Category: BOOK REVIEWS

This is a lovely book, filled with an appealing mixture of wisdom, humour, nostalgia, stories, facts, speculation and common sense. It’s about birdwatching, very much birdwatching, and not just birding, for Rob Hume has watched many birds and thought about what he was seeing and, it seems, enjoyed most of it immensely. In a mixture…

I’m not a great fan of economics because it always seems to explain things in retrospect rather than predict them in prospect but you can write that off as hauteur from one trained as a scientist if you like. But I always like Dieter Helm’s books and in 2019 I chose his Green and Prosperous…

  The British Isles provide nest sites for internationally important proportions of the North Atlantic biogeographical area seabird populations and, for several species, high proportions of global populations. If you want to see large numbers of nesting Manx Shearwaters, Great Skuas and Gannets then this is the place to come. And so it is concerning…

  This book is a visual treat. Photographs of Shetland’s wildlife, mostly birds and mammals, through the seasons. And the photographs are exceptionally fine. As you might expect, there are Otters, Bonxies and Puffins but also a range of unusual and rare birds and sea mammals, many other Shetland seabirds (including the wonderful Storm Petrels…

This is not a wildlife book, although there is wildlife in it, but it is a reprint of a book first published in 1970 and written by a great naturalist, and this book reminds us, a great writer. Also, the introduction is written by Neville Jones, a friend of Bill Condry and an acquaintance of…

This small book is built around the idea of writing about 24 birds from around the world, but one for each hour of the day. What is the species doing at that particular time? It’s an approach that works partly but not, in my opinion, brilliantly. After all, you need to know something about the…