Standing up for Nature
I recently reviewed Jim Crumley’s book, Lakeland Wild, and loved it – see here. And Jim was kind enough to post a comment on that review recently. But publishers are no fools and those nice people in Saraband sent me another couple of Jim’s books, including this one, pointing out that it had recently been…
This is a lovely book about summer, and particularly the summer of 2020, the summer of covid. There is much about wildlife, particularly, but not just, birds, of climate change and how that affects the wildlife around us and of the special constraints and disruptions of lockdowns. There are some great accounts of wildlife observations,…
This is a very interesting read. It is an exploration and an explanation of ecological principles illustrated by UK natural history, much of it through strolls through particular parts of our farmland, forests and uplands. This approach works well, and it is a different type of New Naturalist from most recent additions to this venerable…
I enjoyed reading this book very much. It immediately gets into my list of books of the year although I’d be surprised if it gets to the top of that shortlist, but you never know. I enjoyed it for three main reasons. First, it is a good read, clearly expressed and argued with some passion…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…