Standing up for Nature
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This is the tale of an almost 1000-mile walk from the southern edge of the New Forest to Cape Wrath by a fit 62-year-old who encounters landscapes, people and wildlife on his journey of 51 walking days. It’s a good read and I enjoyed it very much. Quite honestly, the interactions with people, fellow walkers,…
This is a book of three parts: our broken relationship with nature; the benefits of connecting with nature; and how to fix things. Each is an interesting look at the issues and the author brings a lot of his own thoughts and experiences into the book, as well as the studies and evidence from academia….