He was a policeman. That's the bit that gets left off — Michael Rogers, born 1932, worked a career in the force and then spent decades as honorary secretary of the British Birds Rarities Committee, which means thousands of envelopes. Someone in Shetland writes three pages about a small brown bird on a fence. Someone in Cornwall sends a sketch and a plea. He read them all.
The job is mostly saying no, kindly. Not accepted, insufficient detail on the primary projection, thank you for the record. I've written those descriptions myself and sat on the reply for a week. What I think about is the patience it takes to hold a stranger's best morning in your hands and weigh it honestly. He died in 2006. The committee still runs on the habits he set.
The committee's ten voting members got nicknamed the ten rare men, which sounds like a quiz round I'd write and is in fact a real unpaid job. Thousands of envelopes and he answered them.
Kit, a fair number of those envelopes would have come off St Mary's in October, written up by people who'd stood eight hours in horizontal rain with a notebook going soft in their hands. Pencil, not pen, if they'd any sense — ink runs at that angle.