A birding benchmark

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

Penning the Birds of Nunavut has been a tale of extremes for Jim Richards.

On the one hand, capturing the images that fill the upcoming book involved traveling to Canada’s arctic reaches and hours in climates where the temperatures can change on a dime and one must be armed with something a little more powerful than a DSLR and a long lens in order to protect themselves from the bears.

After all that, it’s been hours of edits, writing and correspondence with his fellow co-editor and co-authors as they pieced together the first book ever dedicated to the birds of Nunavut.

“It’s nice to see the end of it, it’s been a long haul, but a fun experience of course,” he says.

While the final manuscript was sent in June, and University of British Columbia is getting ready to officially launch the book at the end of this month, it has been an extensive editing process in recent weeks to finish things up.

“I don’t think a day has gone by since back in June when there hasn’t been something to do,” Richards says with a laugh.

However, even before the weeks of edits, the project has been a passion for Richards for several years, staring instantly after he fell in love with the territory of Nunavut when he first visited.

In terms of the avian life, there are many unique aspects of the species in the territory.

When it comes down to it, a lot of the birds that travel to the far reaches of Canada to breed can be seen in other more habitable places for birders. Richards notes that perhaps there is only one species of bird that can only be seen in Nunavut.

The new book will include 145 “true” arctic breeding species and 147 extra-limital species of birds.

On Aug. 21, Richards will be flying out to the west coast for the launch event of the book. It will be a chance to celebrate an accomplishment that has yet to be seen in the birding world.

“It’s not just that it’s a first, but it will serve as a baseline for all future studies, research and whatnot,” he says. “It’s very timely and very important, I know the folks at Environment Canada are very pleased with it.”

Along with that, the event will give Richards a chance to meet the rest of the team involved with the book, including co-authors and those at UBC Press, people he has corresponded with for years online, but never met in person.

“It will be nice to meet a few of them and I’m really looking forward to, quite frankly, meeting the good folks at UBC Press, they’ve been very good to deal with, very professional, a real keen eye for detail and stuff. They’ve been really great to work with,” he says.

A life-long birder, Richards became a fairly common face in the Oshawa area during the fight to save the Oshawa Second Marsh in the early 1970s, founding the Second Marsh Defence Association. The group would go on to become the Friends of Second Marsh which is still operating today.

This is also not Richards’s first foray into the publishing world. In 1974, alongside close friend and Algonquin Park naturalist Ron Tozer, the pair wrote the Birds of the Oshawa-Lake Scugog Region. Since then, Richards has also written and co-authored five books, several book chapters, journal notes and magazine articles dealing mainly with birds.

For his current project, he says he’s looking forward to seeing how the birding community receives the book.

“I am humble but at the same time I am proud of myself. I’m looking forward to the reviews, hoping like hell they’re all going to be favourable,” he says with a laugh.

The project has also received monetary support from a collection of agencies including Bird Studies Canada, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the World Wildlife Fund, the Government of Nunavut, and the Canada Wildlife Service.