Ordinarily, I tend to avoid birding memoirs with approximately the same effort as I avoid elective root canals. For while I am an avid bird watcher myself, I have never quite found it all that interesting to read about other people’s birding adventures – particularly when they’re trying to break some sort of record. So when an advance reading copy of Neil Hayward’s Lost Among the Birds; Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year recently arrived on my desk from Bloomsbury, as you might imagine, I was less than excited about it.