So much more than a picture on a Christmas card

Title: Bob the Robin: A love letter to Britain’s favourite bird

Author: Tony Putman

Publisher: Gaia; 2024

ISBN: 978-1-85675-531-3

Price: £16.99 (hardback)

Bob the Robin does not fit neatly into any one genre. It is part (as it says in the sub-title) a love letter to Britain’s favourite bird, part memoir and part a tribute to our natural world.

There is no doubt that the author, Tony Putman, has loved animals from his childhood and we are carried along as his particular love of Robins develops.

Following grief-stricken endings of his previous friendships with robins, the author is determined never to get close to these birds again. This obviously comes to naught as he engages with Bob – or, rather, Bob engages with him!

As Putman, accompanied by his dogs, works in a large garden round the seasons, a deep and trusting friendship develops between man and bird which the author went on to document on social media, under the title Putman and Robin, and which attracted a large following of more than 100,000. They went on to feature on television and radio programmes.

As many of us know, these enchanting birds are present in gardens (urban or rural, tiny or large), parks and open spaces. They will often sit on your garden spade, wheelbarrow handle or a nearby stone or fence post, just watching or, perhaps, waiting for their take-away delicacy which has been unearthed. As Putman says, stereotypically robins will always go for the juicy worm – not so with Bob, who preferred spiders above all else.

There is a small section devoted to folklore about how the birds got their red breasts. I particularly liked the poem Robin Round, by U. A. Fanthorpe which, as Putman says, “encapsulates perfectly some of the many ways we see the robin, as Christmas emblem, as opportunist and as friend.” Speaking of which, towards the end of the book I was intrigued to learn that ”in Victorian times, postmen were known as robins thanks to the red-breasted uniforms they wore, so there is a theory that the original reason [robins] adorn our Christmas cards is that they represented the men who delivered them.”

There is a splash of beautiful photographs in the centre of the book - the result of Putman’s perseverance in learning how to use a camera so effectively.

Bob the Robin is a delight and cheered me up during the gloomy, gale-swept days of January. It is easy to read, with well-spaced, good-sized text interspersed with quite a few line drawings of some of the birds and animals that we meet in the book.

Tessa Briggs