Birds in a Cage: Warburg, Germany, 1941 by Derek Niemann - review

Mark Cocker on an inspiring and affectionate tale of British POW ornithologists
Adult male redstart
The adult male redstart Photograph: Steve Round/

In September 1942 German forces had just established their suicidal hold over Stalingrad, while Rommel's Afrika Korps had made its last-gasp conquests in the Western Desert. As the whole second world war turned on its creaking pivot, several English POWs faced changes of a more parochial nature. They had just exchanged the site of their incarceration to a Bavarian town called Eichstätt, where the prison camp was set among sunlit limestone bluffs and forest-smothered hills. Yet it was not the autumn scenery that inspired Peter Conder, one of Eichstätt's fresh inmates, to call it "as near to paradise in a prison camp".

Conder, like several other prisoners, including a tall dashing Scotsman, George Waterston, and John Buxton, an aspiring poet, had found a way to defeat the soul-withering hardships of military custody by watching birds flitting in and around the barbed-wire fences. When Conder clapped eyes on that smiling Bavarian valley, he knew he was in great bird country. What followed at Eichstätt and in subsequent POW camps makes for a quintessential story of British stiff upper lips in the face of defeat, but it also amounts to one of the most bizarre and enriching episodes in the history of British environmentalism.

The years under guard would create an enduring bond between these bird-obsessed men, who, however, kept quiet about their experience after the war. Their story has come to light thanks to Derek Niemann having been given a previously unknown cache of letters belonging to the Conder family. He has pieced together a further archive of interlocking correspondence and papers and created an affectionate, engaging and often humorous portrait of their prison ornithology.

Somehow, a surreal, very British comedy arises when caged men watch birds in the middle of the biggest war in history. Yet Niemann never seeks to gloss over the military facts. He gives us, if only incidentally, the British high command's life-wasting incompetence in Norway, France and Crete, which reduced these men to chattels of the enemy. Nor does he shirk the squalor and violence of prison life. Officers were shot dead at their hut windows, simply because they failed to respond to the guards' call for lights out. Several men were so defeated by the brutal routine they threw themselves at the perimeter wire to end the torment.

Niemann also spares us of none of the lice, fleas, freezing cold, malnourishment and chronic ill health. When Waterston arrived in camp from the Allied debacle in Crete, he was suffering from dysentery, cholera and stomach ulcers. He was eventually repatriated to Scotland in 1944 and died, decades later, of a kidney infection caused by prison life. Niemann, an RSPB professional, is well placed to explain the positive therapy offered by birds and the observation of birds in the midst of this physical hell. The men would sometimes spend almost all of their daylight hours studying species that came into the camp. Buxton's chosen subject was a glorious cinnamon and smoky-blue summer migrant called the common redstart (pictured); Waterston's obsession was a small woodpecker, the wryneck.

My favourite avian anecdote, however, concerns their studies of passing migrant rooks and jackdaws, which would pause in their passage from Soviet Russia and swoop to feed on the mountains of human ordure that manured the local fields. One can only guess how the irreducible ideas of freedom implicit in flying birds, even amid such scenes of stinking banality, would have salved the spirits of these resilient men. Testament to this is that Waterston and Buxton often seemed to have half the camp inmates taking part in their time-absorbing and mind-freeing bird projects.

There was, in truth, little genuine ornithological merit in these prison studies. Conder's long months of goldfinch-watching may have yielded a paper filling a few journal pages. Waterston never wrote up his wrynecks, while another man, John Barrett, posted to himself at war's end a huge body of raw data that never arrived. Only Buxton made full use of his prison years. He went on to become an Oxford don and author of an acclaimed book, The Redstart. Much of the research for this graceful and allusive biography of one of Britain's most beautiful birds was conducted while he was in German custody.

Yet this was not the real fruit of their war work. Each of these prisoners would, in his own way, give back to birds the life-changing opportunities the creatures had given them. Waterston became a charismatic leader of conservation in late 20th-century Scotland. It was his genius that dreamt up Operation Osprey. He had divined that the best way to safeguard the nation's rarest birds of prey was not to smother them in secrecy and caution, but to broadcast them to the nation. Millions of visitors have now trooped to Loch Garten reserve, making its dynasty of fish-eating raptors the most famous of avian soap operas. Conder eventually became Waterston's nominal boss as director of the RSPB. On his watch the organisation morphed from a body of enthusiastic amateurs into a professional conservation machine.

Niemann's underpinning message is not simply about the resilience of men, but the restorative effects of immersing oneself in nature, which flows on irrespective of any human context. On the wisdom that resides in birds we should perhaps leave the last word to Buxton, who wrote on his first hours of liberty in France: "A nightingale singing all through the night … a lovely welcome out of Germany."

Mark Cocker's Crow Country is published by Vintage. To order Birds in a Cage for £14 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to