[DeepL Translation - needs review] Pigeons are looking for girlfriends all year round! There is no such thing as a white-fronted egret! Female ducks are too hard to tell apart! Hajime Tobita, a cartoonist who sought solace in his daily life, has arrived at a "wild bird swamp" where he is completely immersed in the world of birds. Birds in the wild are so much fun! This is a casual and easygoing bird-watching essay presented with an unparalleled eye for observation and drawing ability!
(Translator: DeepL)
A very cute comic essay about the joys of birdwatching, based on the author's experiences. I liked that a lot of his experiences in getting deeper and deeper into different birds mirrored my own a lot. There's always that one bird that you start of noticing, in Tobita's case it's some heron's he notices while going for a walk after waking up early one day, in my case it's ducks, but when you're in proximity of one bird you like, you inevitably notice other birds around them and suddenly you're in deep.
The artwork is a perfect blend of cartoony manga style, but still captures the important details of each bird accurately and the more realistic drawings are beautiful. All the poses, behaviors, and little things you'd recognize if you've gone birding for a while are spot on. I loved the random lone coot tagging along with the ducks and Tobita's journey from "wait what is that? Is that a duck?" to learning what a coot is and obsessing over their weird feet. That's exactly how it was for me. I also liked the plea for people to not arbitrarily hate cormorants, I remember finding them quite cool the first time I saw one, especially how they dive down and pop up somewhere else, and both Tobita and myself were surprised and disappointed to find they're often considered a nuisance bird. There was a lot that I related to and the author's appreciation for even birds that others consider annoying or strange was something I enjoyed.
Reading this in Japanese was also surprisingly smooth. Sometimes when I read more informational or real-world books and manga I can struggle with all the jargon, but this does a great job teaching you the more sciencey jargon in context and not getting too in the weeds. Each chapter has a rundown of it's featured bird and the whole manga is a great source for very specific adjectives describing the texture and color of various features on the birds. I learned a lot of fun factoids and trivia about different birds and their behaviors so it was educational in more ways than just the language-learning aspect. Another pleasant surprise was that Tobita's handwriting is actually very clean and legible. I almost always have issues reading handwritten interjections and afterwords in Manga, but even the kana and kanji that appear in their more "typical handwriting" form were legible and Tobita does a good job writing in a straight line which is a lot more than I can say for some mangaka. I can't tell if I'm just getting better at reading handwriting or if he really is a cut above with his penmanship, but either way I was able to read pretty much everything that was written by hand.
This was a cute, fun read and if you love birds it's a must-have. I liked it so much I bought a physical copy after finishing the e-book.