This book isn’t quite what it seems, but on first glance it is a very simple and moderately engaging account of the birds heard or seen in a Wiltshire garden on 6 May 2025. The author spends 17 hours up and active and uses the Merlin app to help identify all the calls and songs. The list of 38 species contains some fine songsters and a variety of species about which the author can comment and enthuse.
The book also contains suggestions for how to make your garden wildlife-friendly from not using pesticides to having a compost heap. And the author must know what he is talking about as he has nearly 20 species of bird nesting in his garden including Buzzard and Spotted Flycatcher.
I noticed on the back cover that the book has a quote from Viscount Ridley (see here for his form) praising this book for its common sense and insights which rang some alarm bells for me. And I think I discovered why when I reached Part Five which claims to contain inconvenient truths but which is rather rambling and contains swipes at Wild Justice, at Red Kites, White-tailed Eagles, Pine Martens, Wild Cats and conservationists. Part Six, Making the Garden Wildlife Friendly (in the index but Making a Garden Wildlife-friendly when you get to it), contains the swipes at rewilding. This is all from the ‘real countryman’ songsheet and I notice that the author is an ambassador for Conservation Communication one of whose leading lights is Ian Coghill (see here for a long review of his book on grouse shooting). There is no suggestion in the publisher’s description of the book that in an account of the birds seen and heard on a spring day in a Wiltshire garden one is going to be subjected to all this.
There are some inconsistencies in the text and the Epilogue reads as though it was once the Foreword to this book (containing a description of the garden and an explanation of why the author felt moved to write it). How else can one explain the words ‘It will be a seventeen-hour opportunity to observe and record a wide range of activity.’ and ‘I invite you to read this book’ on pages 183 and 184 of a book of 192 pages? The cover says that over 40 bird species were recorded on the day whereas the list of those species (pp104-5) is 38 species.
The idea of a single day and its birds is appealing but it takes a skilled writer to carry this off if one has 38 species with which to work and the opportunity to write about one’s garden as well. This book doesn’t do it for me.
The cover? The cover image, by David White, is lovely because Robins are lovely and the light is just right on this one. It’s very rare to capture the breath of a bird so clearly and I did pause to wonder whether that stream of breath is quite where I’d expect it to be, but I gave up wondering as it is so attractive. I’d give it 9/10.
One Day A Thousand Songs by John Miller is published by MerlinUnwin.
You could buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase
[registration_form]