You should take it as a measure of my fairness that even though I think large parts of this book are poorly argued (hardly argued at all, really) I believe that it is so wonderfully well written, and so exquisitely irritating, that it will certainly be vying for my book of the year for 2024….
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Sunday book review – The Little Book of Spiders by Simon D. Pollard
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This book is one of a series of Little Books which are little books but they pack a big punch. They will remind many readers of Observer books because they are a similar size, but don’t let the small dimensions make you think that these books are lightweights. Not at all. This volume deals with…
Being a conservation investor 5 – what I think of the NT response.
I wrote to the National Trust to get some information on which I could decide whether or not to give them my membership or my donations. My book Reflections proposes that we should all think of ourselves as ‘conservation investors’ and decide where our money is best spent amongst the large range of wildlife charities…
Moorland Ass
It’s difficult to tell whether the Moorland Association is still alive, it had shown few signs of life during the last years of Amanda Anderson’s reign and the patient still seems to be in intensive care under Andrew Gilruth’s tenure. It appears that the brains of the Moorland Association have decided that a ‘let’s kill…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 27 – by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Being a conservation investor 4 – a response from the NT
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Thank you to all who have offered me advice on how I should travel to various NT properties to attempt to get my questions answered but I simply emailed them at enquiries@nationaltrust.org.uk thus: I wrote this blog https://markavery.info/2024/03/16/being-a-conservation-investor-2-the-national-trust/ and received this response https://markavery.info/2024/04/21/being-a-conservation-investor-3-the-national-trust-brushes-me-off/ from Harry Bowell – it won’t do. Please organise a proper response. My next move will…
Sunday book review – Hunt for the Shadow Wolf by Derek Gow
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I have reviewed two of Derek Gow’s earlier books (Bringing Back the Beaver, September 2020; Birds, Beasts and Bedlam, July 2022) and both were very good books, but this is by some way a better book than either of those, which, to me, makes it an excellent book. You don’t have to be mad keen…
Sunday book review – Ponds, Pools and Puddles by Jeremy Biggs and Penny Williams
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Every new New Naturalist is worth a look and this one is a hefty 614 pages of information, illustrations, photographs and graphs about smallish waterbodies, written by two acknowledged experts. It has to be said that the New Naturalists have regained their ability to produce well-illustrated books with clear colour photographs and fairly clear graphs…
Sunday book review – The Vanishing Mew Gull by Ray Reedman
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I have to admire the author for bringing together a taxonomic list of 1100 birds found in the Western Palearctic (about 1 in 10 of the world’s birds) and explaining the origins of their English vernacular names and scientific names. If that is the book you want, then this is the book for you. I…
Sunday book review – The Little Book of Beetles by Arthur V. Evans
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This book is one of a series of Little Books which are little books but they pack a big punch. They will remind many readers of Observer books because they are a similar size, but don’t let the small dimensions make you think that these books are lightweights. Not at all. This volume (I will…