Bond—James Bond

The other day, Betsy and I were watching the James Bond movie Die Another Day on TV. It stars Pierce Brosnan, maybe the best of all the James Bonds, in my opinion—though I do have a soft spot for Roger Moore as well. Here's a poster from the movie:



The film was pretty typical, as James Bond movies go, but one scene in particular caught our attention. James Bond goes to visit a colleague in Cuba, and decides to pretend to be a birdwatcher, so as not to draw attention as he checks things out with a pair of binoculars. Here he is with the binoculars—and, of course, a gun!



He also needs a field guide to make his cover convincing, so he picks one up from the colleague's bookshelf:



The author's name is blurred in the movie, but here's another look at it:



It's a bit hard to make out, but does the name look familiar? James Bond?  Here are a couple other views of the book from different editions:







Apparently, Ian Fleming—the creator of James Bond— was an avid birder. When he retired from the spy business he built a home on the beach in Jamaica, called Goldeneye for one of his field operations, and so he needed a field guide to birds of the West Indies. When he was looking for a name for his super spy, he thought that James Bond, the author of his bird guide, sounded suitably plain and ordinary, so James Bond it was.

I had never known about this connection between James Bond and birds before. I wonder if Fleming was also interested in dragonflies. If so, and if he had been creating his books today, perhaps his spy could have been Walker—James Walker.  Just a thought!