Angus Proctor
Books! Or to be more accurate, wildlife books dealing with Hong Kong. What really astounds me as I scan the shelves of the new, bigger, better bookshops which have sprung up around the malls of Causeway Bay, Kowloon Tong and their ilk, is the ready availability of Birds of Britain, Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe, Reptiles of Antarctica (made that one up), and Butterflies of the World. What possible use are they to us here in Hong Kong? Very little, is the answer.
Are these shopkeepers deluged with requests from folk who are jetting off for a bit of twitching in the UK? I recognise that Brits are remembered with undiluted fondness by Hongkongers, but does this extend to Britain's relatively poor temperate fauna and flora? I think not. I suspect that at least part of the reason you can buy so many Western nature books here, is that they are almost all printed in Hong Kong. What is really saddening is that there are some local gems out there.
Keith Wilson's Hong Kong Dragonflies is superbly illustrated with an informative text. Viney, Lam & Phillipps' Birds of Hong Kong has been with us for years, and should be kept in every school in the SAR (there is after all a separate Chinese text version). Larsen, Lau & Bogadek's revised Hong Kong Amphibian and Reptiles is streets ahead of its predecessor. Paul Lau's Butterflies of Hong Kong (bi-lingual, so that should be in schools too) filled a yawning gap - I just hope he's working on Volume II, because I keep finding butterflies which he hasn't covered. And therein lies the point. There is a fabulous amount of wildlife out there on our doorstep. I challenge you to find any of these books on the shelves of Hong Kong's shops.
Just to rub salt in the wound (1 know the comparison always goes down like a lead lemming), I also challenge you to check out the availability of comparable books if you're ever down in Singapore. They have a range of at least 27 truly pocket-sized Common Guides costing only around Sing.$5 each. And you should see the range of Southeast Asian books at their airport!
The good news is that WWF-HK are stocking a much wider range of local and Southeast Asian wildlife books out at Mai Po these days - it's a long trek, but hey you can kill two birds.., well, that's an unfortunate metaphor, perhaps.
P.32
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