Standing up for Nature
This is a sumptuous-looking book – truly beautiful. The photographs, by Jim Holden, are gorgeous. It’s a pleasure to flick through the pages, except that one doesn’t flick, one doesn’t want to miss any of them so even in a quick look through the book one finds oneself turning each page carefully. Iain Parkinson is…
This book is about the author’s patch where he walks regularly and studies the farmland birds that it contains – especially the Grey Partridges and Corn Buntings. The site is on the southern edge of Cambridge and from reading the book it seems as though I have passed it several times on trains. Next…
This is a very attractive and interesting book about a species which, these days, I hardly ever see. When did you last see an Adder? I haven’t seen one for years and yet in my youth they were noticeably commoner. As were signs saying ‘Danger Adders’ which I always thought were put in places (eg…
This book is about a bird which seems to be trying quite hard to go extinct but which was, about a century ago, a very familiar part of the countryside throughout the UK. The Corncrake is a bird that once lived in long grass and other dense vegetation right across Europe and into Asia…
Peter Marren is friend of mine (although I haven’t clapped eyes on him for ages) and I have favourably reviewed several of his books here in the past (The Consolation of Nature, with Jeremy Mynott and Michael McCarthy, Chasing the Ghost, Where the Wild Thyme Blew, Rainbow Dust) and so it might not come as…
I went to a talk at the 2018 Bird Fair by the author when he talked about the preparation of this book – and now here it is. It’s a fine field guide. And it really is a field guide – a slim volume that can easily be pocketed in a coat and brought out…
This is a standard New Naturalist – a series of books that doesn’t feel very new, or at all ground-breaking these days. Penny Anderson gives a workpersonlike account of the wildlife and ecology of this area, mostly a National Park, and the habitats it includes. There is mention of raptor persecution. Hen Harrier appears in…
This is a book written by an 18-year-old environmentalist – and it’s being reviewed here by a 64-year-old environmentalist. Forty-six years ago there weren’t books of this sort written by undergraduates and I’m very glad that I didn’t have one published then because I suspect that it would be an embarrassing read with the benefit…
This book, out of 55 I reviewed in 2022, was the title 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 of Bookshop.org…
I hadn’t heard of The Gearagh until I received this book. I can be forgiven for that, perhaps, because it is in Ireland and essentially this superb site for wildlife was destroyed a few years before I was born, in the 1950s. This book describes what we lost and how we lost it. The Gearagh…