Author: Mark

I must apologise to the author and publisher of this book for carrying it around with me for months and not settling down to read it properly. I’m not sure why. It was partly that the cover didn’t engage me. It was partly that I’d never heard of the author. It was partly that I…

This is an exploration of an overlooked but very British habitat – the temperate rainforest. It’s understandable that it is much neglected, there’s not that much of it left and it is, as the name suggests, found in the soggiest places in the north and west of the UK. Its denizens are the fungi, ferns,…

This is one of those ‘questing’ books – on a bicycle this time. The author visits special places for plants in the UK and Ireland, with some interesting botanists, naturalists and landowners, and tells us about the places, people and wildlife. It’s a winning recipe and this is a very fine example of the genre….

I enjoyed this book, but then I went into it expecting more in the way of entertainment than instruction, and I was right. It is entertaining, provided that you have the mindset to be entertained by views that you don’t share (which I do) or you embrace with enthusiasm the views of the author (which…

There are quite a lot of books about Big Years – when birders try to see a high number of species of birds in a calendar year.  These books are quite similar as they usually have some introduction about why the author, usually male, bothered, and then an account of the ups and downs of…