Category: Book review

This is a book about urban wildlife and although the author says that she majors on plants and knows less about other groups she is very clearly competent across a wide range. She is based in London and each of the eight two-chapter sections of the book sees her turning her back on St. Pauls…

This book has a laudable aim, to wit to nudge us to travel less in cars, but it’s quite a big ambition in a country with poor public transport, and for a leisure activity where some of the best places are out of town and somewhat remote. But here you will find a variety of…

Following on from The Wryneck (published 2022, click here for my review) and The Green Woodpecker (published 2023, click here for my review) woodpecker expert and enthusiast, Gerard Gorman, brings you a volume which deals with five black and white woodpeckers (Lesser Spotted, Middle Spotted, Great Spotted, Syrian, and White-backed), two of which occur in…

This is an excellent book produced by a local natural history society to celebrate its 70 years of existence. It takes 70 local species and tells the reader interesting things about them. We meet the Red Squirrels of Mersea Island, the coastal Brent Goose, Essex Skipper, Fisher’s Estuarine Moth, the Abberton Weevil, Giant Puffball, a…

The author of this book, Lucy, is a friend and colleague with whom I’ve worked at Wild Justice and on other projects and I was nervous about whether I would get on with this book. After all, she is a young person, the same age as my kids, and young people see the world in…

If your New Year resolution is anything to do with seeing more wildlife, becoming a little better at identifying what you see or getting to the top of the list of individuals who have seen the most species of wildlife in the UK then this book is for you. The author is widely recognised as…

I have reviewed 50 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might give you some ideas and I’ve whittled it down to a shortlist of eight books that most impressed me…

Nicola Chester writes superbly well and has a close relationship with the natural world. This book takes the area around the author’s home, and where she grew up, and travels back to the 1940s, war time, to describe the rural community then. Much of the detail comes from the diaries of a woman farmer and…

The author and his partner settle in to living in northern Greece, near the borders with Albania and North Macedonia, and close to the two Prespa Lakes. Imagine Driving over Lemons with less driving, fewer lemons and a lot more wildlife. This book is a very good read partly because of the thoughtfulness of the…

The 429 spiders and 26 harvestmen species covered in this book form a significant proportion of the c700 spiders and 31 harvestmen in the UK which would have come as a surprise to Martin Lister who wrote the first book on English spiders which described 34 spiders and three harvestmen, opining that there was little…