Standing up for Nature
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…
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…
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…
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…
Charles Foster’s previous book, The Screaming Sky (reviewed here) was so good that I made it one of my books of 2021 (click here) and that made me keen to read this book. I wasn’t at all disappointed but Cry of the Wild is a very different book and may not be to everyone’s taste…