This is a smallish book, Ladybird book in size, of 80 pages, over 20 of which are occupied by Maxime Beck’s attractive illustrations. The text, by Elvira Werkman, covers a lot of ground very clearly in such a short space. I read most of the book, with pleasure, in one sitting. There is a useful…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Call of the Kingfisher by Nick Penny
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This book is set a few miles from where I live – down the River Nene a few miles – around Oundle. The author makes regular walks, through the calendar year, and covers quite a lot of ground beside the river near his home. He sees much of the local Kingfishers, but much more besides….
Sunday book review – Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman et al.
This book takes the Japanese view of many mini-seasons of a few days and fits it to the natural rhythms of UK wildlife. It’s close to an approach tried before by Lev Parikian (Light Rains Sometimes Fall – reviewed here) but in my view, it’s done even more successfully here. The four authors took the…
Sunday book review – Earth by Chris Packham and Andrew Cohen
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This is the book of the series – and I loved the 5-episode TV series. But the TV series moved around the world and moved us back in time through hundreds of millions of years and explored our home through a liberal use of moving computer generated images. All that moving – it’s what television…
Sunday book review – The Purple Sandpiper by Ron Summers
This is a wonderful book and it will undoubtedly be one of my top-10 books of the year for 2023. It is a self-published account of studies of this species, many of them led or enabled by the book’s author. And he did all this alongside his actual work being a research scientist in various…
Sunday book review – The Complete Insect edited by David A. Grimaldi
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Naming your book ‘The Complete…[Anything]’ is quite a statement, calling it The Complete Insect when there are 3.5 million such species might seem like asking for trouble, but this book carries off such a claim very well. It is a book packed with gorgeous photographs, informative and clear diagrams and a wealth of facts. There…
Sunday book review – Tadpole Hunter by Arnold Cooke
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The author of this book was probably Britain’s first professional amphibian conservationist and his recollections of the evolution of the subject go back over five decades. Such insider accounts are valuable records of how we got to the current day. An idea of the importance of Arnold Cooke’s contributions to the field can be gauged…
Sunday book review – Finding W.H. Hudson by Conor Mark Jameson
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,…
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…