This is a brilliant book – it goes straight into my shortlist of Books of the Year for this blog. Any book that starts with the author eating snake and quaffing beer in Madagascar is a bit special. The author states that he is obsessed by Swifts, but actually, if he is, he hides it…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Swifts and Us by Sarah Gibson
This is a good book about Swifts – and those birds are flying about outside as I write this review. But then, they are always flying about somewhere, as the title of the book, and the contents of the book, make clear. This is a bird which is on the wing most of its life,…
Sunday book review – The Glitter in the Green by Jon Dunn
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I remember my first hummingbird. I was sitting on a log in a forest in Canada hoping to see a Beaver (I didn’t) when I heard a whirring sound behind me. I turned, wondering whether I was about to eyeball a large dangerous insect, and was relieved and delighted to see a Ruby-throated Hummingbird feeding…
Sunday book review – Three Million Wheelbarrows by Kathleen Saunders
This is a very interesting book – there is practically nothing in it about wildlife but it is the story of engineering works in The Fens in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s a late part of the subjugation of wildness in the lowlands inland from The Wash in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire (mostly). As…
Sunday book review – Human, Nature by Ian Carter
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Ian Carter has a close association with this blog being a regular commenter, a writer of guest blogs and a contributor of a series of articles on Wild Food and another entitled A Break from Humanity. A very small proportion of that collection of work finds its way into this book – probably what Ian…
Sunday book review – Lakeland Wild by Jim Crumley
I have come late to the works of Jim Crumley as this is the first of his books I have read. It’s wonderful – I have some catching up to do. This is a book about the Lake District, Crumley’s first venture south of Hadrian’s Wall, I gather. Well, he’s very welcome. Come back again…
Sunday book review – A Sky Full of Kites by Tom Bowser
This is the story of the Argaty Kite project, based near Stirling, and that itself is an interesting story, but this book is more than that, in that it is a tale of Red Squirrels, Pine Martens, dragonflies and a host of other creatures, and a tale of a place and a family. I liked…
Sunday book review – A Beginner’s Guide to Dragonflies and Damselflies of Britain and Ireland by David Chandler
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This book was published last year but I missed it. It’s a beginner’s guide – like it says in its title. By that it means that although it covers all the damselflies and dragonflies of the British Isles it concentrates on those species that are most common and widespread – just to get you started….
Sunday book review – International Treaties in Nature Conservation by Stroud, D.A. et al.
This is a small book on a big subject. The subject of international treaties (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Ramsar Convention, the Bern Convention) may not sound gripping but it is important if one wants to understand why governments must behave in certain ways and can be brought to account if they…
Sunday book review – Britain’s Insects by Paul D. Brock
There are over a million species of insect in the world and over 25,000 in Britain and Ireland. How can one produce a useful field guide to those species? This, the latest in the WILDGuides series, is a masterful exercise in clarity, clear design and will get you to the right identification of the species…