Having worked myself up from The Observers Book of Birds and pawnshop opera glasses to Swarovski ELs (and abject poverty) it is has been a cathartic experience to survey a life directed by birdwatching.  Looking back and writing about what happened has given me a chance to don rose-coloured binoculars and make sure that, with the passage of time and the onset of a failing memory, truth did not get in the way of a good story.  The book is about the moments that punctuated days either in the company of birds or in the company of a class of humanity that both Darwin and Linnaeus overlooked - Homo orno, the birdwatcher.  Somewhere in the middle of it all is a deeper meaning - expressed best by Mrs McGeehan who observed the process from the sidelines and has charted, in several pithy epistles, my descent into a Life of Birds."