Oscar writes: while I was in Canada, I had a day to myself in Vancouver, so jumped on a bus and headed to Stanley Park in the hope of finding some wildlife to photograph. The Raccoons there are very confiding, presumable because they are fed by the visitors there, so I spent a couple…
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Favourite nature books?
This is the early stage of a hunt for our favourite nature book – we can all nominate books up until the end of 30 November, and then it will be up to a bunch of learned judges (apparently) to decide on the shortlist of 10 for a public vote in January which is when…
Sunday book review – A History of Birds by Simon Wills
This book is similar in some ways to that reviewed earlier this morning – this one is cheaper and better. Simon Willis chooses 30 species (eg Blue Tit, Lapwing) and groups of birds (eagles, flamingos) and tells us interesting things about them and about people connected to them. This book is beautifully illustrated with…
Sunday book review – Birdmania by Bernd Brunner
This book is really quite annoying. It’s annoying because it has some really good parts but it lacks structure of any sort. Most sentences are perfect but many paragraphs are a collection of sentences that are poorly linked together. I often got to the end of a paragraph and went back to try to…
Tim Melling – Harlequins
Tim writes: I think Harlequins are one of the most beautiful ducks in the world. They breed in Iceland, Greenland, northern North America and eastern Asia. These two were floating in the surf off the Vancouver Island coast. I have always found them to be quite unapproachable, which might explain their scientific name (Histrionicus histrionicus),…