Those who have worked at the RSPB Headquarters at Sandy, and some who have gone there for meetings, will have seen the portrait of Hudson above the stone fireplace in what used to be called the main meeting room where, long ago, staff used to have lunch served to them. He became a familiar sight,…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Wildlife in the Balance by Simon Mustoe
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This is a very good book and contains a great number of insights into how animal ecology works and what we get from all those species of animal out there. Plants don’t get much of a look-in, which is strange at first, and will annoy many folk out there, but actually that is part…
Sunday book review – INN Search of Birds by John Lawton
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This is a fun book by a birder and one of the UK’s most eminent population ecologists. Prof Sir John Lawton CBE FRS has won numerous awards for his science and was the chair of a group which produced an important report known, as the Lawton report, Making Space for Nature, which recommended that England…
Sunday book review – Island to Island by Sally Mills
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This is a follow up to the same author’s Island to Island (reviewed here) but with the subtitle ‘A collection of photographs – the pictures behind the story‘. And it is a book of photographs with some words joining them together from the island of Aride in the Seychelles where the author was a warden…
Sunday book review: The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife by Lee Raye.
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I’ve been looking forward to this book for ages. It arrived yesterday and thanks to a rainy day I was able to spend much of yesterday (and some of today) getting to grips with it. It was worth the wait. I tend to think of the early modern era as involving The Beatles but here…
Sunday book review – Wild Air by James Macdonald Lockhart
This book takes eight interesting bird species, Nightjar, Manx Shearwater, Dipper, Skylark, Raven, Black-throated Diver, Lapwing and Nightingale, and describes the author’s observations of them on repeat visits to particular sites. The chapters thus comprise pen portraits of the individual species and the author’s thoughts about them and the places they inhabit. The range of…
Sunday book review – Solitary Bees by Ted Benton and Nick Owens
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I approach this book as someone who doesn’t know much at all about bees, solitary or otherwise, and would like to learn more. Does this book work for me? Very much so. As we would expect from a New Naturalist, this book is written by palpable experts and as we would hope, in this volume…
Sunday book review – 101 Curious Tales of East African Birds by Colin Beale
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Let’s get my only gripe about this book out of the way – it’s a silly title which gives a slightly false impression of the contents. These are not ‘curious’ tales they are 101 quite finely honed essays about the interesting biology of species that you might well see if you were birding in East…
Sunday book review – Cry of the Wild by Charles Foster
This book, out of 47 I reviewed in 2023, was one of two titles I chose as my wildlife book of the year – I recommend it highly. You can 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…
Bank Holiday Monday book review – The Vegan Gardener
I’m not a vegan and I am a pretty unambitious gardener but I got something from this book. It’s a good introduction to gardening and the vegan bit is rather incidental to most of the book so don’t let that put you off if you have eaten steak tartare recently. As with many gardening…