Sunday book review – A Field Guide to the Carnivores of the World by Luke Hunter and Priscilla Barrett

This is an updated edition of a book which covers many of the most charismatic speces on this planet. From Polar Bear to Least Weasel (that’s our Weasel Mustela nivalis) this book beautifully illustrates mammals with sharp teeth from the biggest to the smallest.

The illustrations are very attractive and cover many subspecies and a large range of skulls and footprints as well as the creatures themselves. It’s a pleasure to flick through the pages.

Two hundred and fifty species are covered; cats, dogs, mustelids, hyaenas, otters, civets, mongooses, skunks and many more. I’d never heard of cusimanses, ferret badgers or hog badgers, and I hadn’t realised there were so many fox species across the world. This is a good guide to the species with distribution maps and information on ecology, behaviour and status.

My sole minor gripe with this book is its title as a ‘field guide’. Field guide generally means a book to be taken into the field to help you identify species and I can’t imagine that this book will be used very often in that way. It’s a small point, but I reckon that simply dropping the word ‘field’ would make the title more accurate and also the book initially more appealing to a larger audience.

This is a good guide to the world’s carnivores.


A Field Guide to the Carnivores of the World (2nd edition) by Luke Hunter and Priscilla Barrett is published by Bloomsbury.

Remarkable Birds by Mark Avery is published by Thames and Hudson – for reviews see here.

Inglorious: conflict in the uplands by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury – for reviews see here.

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