I did wonder, with some trepidation, what a whole book on Manx Shearwaters might be. For sure, they are wonderful birds, as are all birds, and certainly they make remarkable journeys across the oceans, but they come to land to nest on remote islands at night and live down burrows. But I needn’t have worried…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Regeneration by Andrew Painting
This book introduces a strong voice in nature writing to the world. This is Andrew Painting’s first book and it is a cracker. Painting works for the National Trust for Scotland at Mar Lodge Estate in the Cairngorms. This book is about the very long-term regeneration of habitats and wildlife that are underway, and are…
Guest book review – European Breeding Bird Atlas 2
This review is by Roderick Leslie Weighing in at over 5 kilos EBBA2 is stupendous at every level, a spectacular achievement ranging from a continental overview of a crucial element of our environment to the best guide to where to find breeding birds. The big change since EBBA1, published in 1997, is the near complete…
The Well-read Naturalist has reviewed…
I’ve been catching up with John Riutta’s recent book reviews on The Well-read Naturalist. I read all of his book reviews even those that are rather local to his part of the world, of northern Oregon. I read them because they are so thoughtful and so well written. I sometimes feel I’d rather read John’s…
Sunday book review – Skylarks with Rosie by Stephen Moss
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This is a book about lockdown and the fact that it has appeared well within a year of the start of UK lockdown last spring is quite an achievement by the author and the publisher – so, well done both! This is essentially a diary of how Stephen Moss, author, broadcaster and naturalist (particularly birder)…
Sunday book review – Restoring the Wild by Roy Dennis
Roy Dennis is a ‘name’ in ornithology and nature conservation – he was the warden of the Fair Isle Bird Observatory from 1964-70 (following Ken Williamson and Peter Davis), the RSPB’s person in the Highlands (under various job titles) from 1970-90 and, ever since, an independent conservationist mostly involved with species reintroductions and habitat restoration….
Sunday book review – A Curious Boy by Richard Fortey
I’m not very familiar with Richard Fortey, not having read any of his previous books nor, as best as I can recall, seen him on TV. So I came to read his book of memoirs uncluttered by preconceptions. This book is about Fortey’s childhood through to young adulthood and about the role of natural history…
Riches not beyond measure
I occasionally update you on the impressive scale of my earnings as a writer. I started doing this because of trolling by shooters about how I was coining it in! But I’ve noticed that quite a lot of people think that every book one writes pays for an expensive new car. This is the latest…
Sunday book review – The Swallow by Stephen Moss
On a cold, rainy winter’s day it’s cheering to think that Swallows might be back with us in a couple of months. I look forward to that but in some ways I enjoyed the last chapter of Stephen Moss’s latest (or have I missed one?) book the most because he takes us to Africa where…
Sunday book review – Wild Farming by Robin Page
It would be fair to ask what this book is about: and that is a question to which there is no easy answer. The first part of the answer is that it is not the book pictured above envisaged by booksellers (eg see here, here, here), and indeed Quiller (the intended publisher) who claimed Wild…