Birdsong lives in June Stannard.
This book is dedicated to her late husband John her beloved companion who travelled by her side through nature, closely observing wild creatures large and small in South Africa and African reserves and wilderness areas. She traces our African birds and animals, their sounds, behavior, as she experienced them throughout her life, bringing wildlife closer to human ears, eyes and hearts.
A girl of Zululand, schooled at Durban Girls College, a painter, Second  World War cartographer and staff sergeant; a poet who had three post- war poems published in the 1984 Anthology of SA Poetry, an amateur ornithologist, bird listener and tape recordist, who spent days and night in Eastern Cape forests with her tape recorder and primitive hand- held microphone. June Stannard established the first Library of Bird Sounds, Song & Calls in SA. The library was the third in the world – after Cornell University and the BBC.

An intense and quietly passionate intellectual, she is a survivor of the 20th century, an early and uncompromising South African naturalist, educator and commentator in journals, magazines and newspapers. June Stannard painstakingly made the first long -playing records of birds sounds.
Recognition also came quietly, but strongly. She was appointed Honorary Research Associate of the Poetry Fitzpatrick Institute of Ornithology, and later honored with Life Membership of the Ornithological Society. In 1982 she was admitted as Associate Member of the Transvaal Museum, where the bird library is now housed, and in 1958 was appointed Honorary Associate of The Natal Museum for her interest in invertebrate animals. In 1999 she received a Conservation Award from Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife.

As global weather patterns change and natural habitats are constricted, fragmented and plants and creatures become extinct, work like hers –sculpted from pure passion carved by curiosity and driven by dogged personal commitment – could prove in time to be part of the historic canon of natural life on an earth keenly remembered, but not conserved. But this is not her wish. June Stannard’s compassion and love – her own call  to humans to live in constructive and intelligent harmony with  nature comes through most strongly in her witty and informative Wild Rhymes, published by the Wildlife  Society, which she wrote and illustrated not just for her numerous grandchildren, but for all children – and adults , too .

A reserved and beloved figure in her South Coast community, June Stannard builds bridges of understanding between  humans and the natural world. We are taken under wing on one women’s historic flight over South Africa and Africa from the 1920s until today.