Birds of the West Indies by James Bond

Birds of the West Indies is known not only for its exhaustive study of Caribbean birds, but also because the name of the book's author, the ornithologist James Bond, which was used by Ian Fleming for the name of his fictional British secret agent, Commander James Bond.

Die Another Day (2002)
The book has become a collector's item amongst Bond fans and was featured as an homage in the twentieth James Bond film, Die Another Day when Bond poses as an ornithologist while in Cuba. The book with the cover as seen in Die Another Day (see photo on the left) is hard to find. You can try eBay, or AbeBooks.co.uk where some older versions will sometimes be offered.

SPECTRE (2015)
The book also appears in a SPECTRE teaser image released on March 12th 2015. A SPECTRE clapperboard (with the date 10-03-2015) can be seen next to the edition of the book on a table in a room in the London location where earlier scenes were filmed.

GoldenEye (1989 tv film)
The same 1960s edition of Birds of the West Indies as seen in the SPECTRE promotional photo can be spotted in the 1989 film GoldenEye, a biographical movie about Ian Fleming starring Charles Dance.

Ian Fleming
Fleming, a keen bird watcher while living at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, owned the book. He later explained that he chose the name of its author for the hero of his first Bond novel Casino Royale in 1953, because he wanted a name that sounded 'as ordinary as possible'. Fleming wrote to the real Bond's wife, "It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born."

About the Book
First published in 1936, the second edition (1947) was titled Field Guide To Birds Of The West Indies: A Guide To All The Species Of Birds Known From The Greater Antilles, Lesser Antilles and Bahama Islands. The book is still in print by the Peterson field guide company under the title, Birds of the West Indies.

From Grand Bahama Island in the north to Grenada in the south, this guide covers a tropical avifaunal region which includes such species as the tiny bee hummingbird, parrots, honey-creepers and todies. For every resident species there are notes on diagnostic characters, local names, voice, habitat, identification and range.