This is an excellent book produced by a local natural history society to celebrate its 70 years of existence. It takes 70 local species and tells the reader interesting things about them. We meet the Red Squirrels of Mersea Island, the coastal Brent Goose, Essex Skipper, Fisher’s Estuarine Moth, the Abberton Weevil, Giant Puffball, a…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Love is a Toad by Lucy Lapwing
The author of this book, Lucy, is a friend and colleague with whom I’ve worked at Wild Justice and on other projects and I was nervous about whether I would get on with this book. After all, she is a young person, the same age as my kids, and young people see the world in…
Sunday book review – Pan-species Listing by Graeme Lyons
If your New Year resolution is anything to do with seeing more wildlife, becoming a little better at identifying what you see or getting to the top of the list of individuals who have seen the most species of wildlife in the UK then this book is for you. The author is widely recognised as…
This blog’s Book of 2025
I have reviewed 50 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might give you some ideas and I’ve whittled it down to a shortlist of eight books that most impressed me…
Sunday book review – Ghosts of the Farm by Nicola Chester
Nicola Chester writes superbly well and has a close relationship with the natural world. This book takes the area around the author’s home, and where she grew up, and travels back to the 1940s, war time, to describe the rural community then. Much of the detail comes from the diaries of a woman farmer and…
Sunday book review – Lifelines by Julian Hoffman
The author and his partner settle in to living in northern Greece, near the borders with Albania and North Macedonia, and close to the two Prespa Lakes. Imagine Driving over Lemons with less driving, fewer lemons and a lot more wildlife. This book is a very good read partly because of the thoughtfulness of the…
Sunday book review – Spiders and Harvestmen of Yorkshire by Richard I. Wilson.
The 429 spiders and 26 harvestmen species covered in this book form a significant proportion of the c700 spiders and 31 harvestmen in the UK which would have come as a surprise to Martin Lister who wrote the first book on English spiders which described 34 spiders and three harvestmen, opining that there was little…
Sunday book review – Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone by Robert B. Keitle
I’ve been to Yellowstone twice and I’m so glad I’ve had that experience. The World’s first National Park and the home of Old Faithful, the Great Prismatic Spring, beautiful views, Grey Wolves, Brown Bears and quite a lot of controversy. This book is, as the title fairly suggests, a book about nature conservation in the…
Sunday book review – The Birds of Bedfordshire by Tony Ploszajski
This new county avifauna is a lovely book considering that Bedfordshire, like my adopted home county of Northamptonshire, is land-locked and, in many ways, is an unspectacular county for birds. But there are birds everywhere and their numbers change for a wide variety of reasons so every county avifauna is full of information destined to…
Sunday book review – The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester
I was reading this book when Storm Melissa hit Jamaica and that was a timely reminder of the destructive power of winds. In this book I learned that some parts of the world may be losing their winds and there is also concern about Global Stilling. There was lots to interest me in these pages…