Stephen Moss is a naturalist, author and course leader of the MA Travel & Nature Writing at Bath Spa University. His latest book, The Swallow: A Biography, is published by Square Peg (£12.99). Here is his annual round-up of books about wildlife, nature and the environment. @stephenmoss_tv [Mark writes: where I have read and reviewed…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – The Ring Ouzel by Vic Fairbrother and Ken Hutchinson
This superb book is the result of 20 years’ study of this one species by two men. I don’t know much about the two authors but they describe themselves as neither professional ornithologists nor academics – they are amateurs in only the best senses of the word. And rather than an amateur study we should…
Sunday book review – The Disappearance of Butterflies by Joseph Reicholf
This book is a great read. We should be grateful that we now have the opportunity to read this book, first published in German in 2018, in English. The author is a distinguished German entomologist. The book’s title is just slightly misleading in that it is not just about the disappearance of butterflies, for two…
Book review – The Law of the Wild by Ian Swingland
Ian Swingland is a friend of mine and it’s his 74th birthday tomorrow, so I thought I’d mention his recently-published book which is an autobiography. Ian came into my life in my 20s in the late 1970s in Oxford through a friend of a friend and we were in the same circle of Oxford-associated biologists…
The Well-read Naturalist
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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 – Bird Senses by Graham Martin
The cover of this book shows a beautiful Great Grey Owl with yellow eyes, barred feathers and trailing legs in flight, with what looks like snow falling off its legs and feet. The blurred background looks like a forest and the book’s title is in yellow with the rest of the writing in white but…
Best bird book of 2020?
The Birdwatch Birders’ Choice awards allow you to vote for the best bird book of the year. These are the five short-listed books: Red Sixty Seven All the Birds of the World Multimedia Identification Guide: shearwaters Diary of a Young Naturalist Moult and Ageing of European Passerines I’ve only read one of these books, but…
Sunday book review – Birds of the UK Overseas Territories edited by Roger Riddington
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The UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are 14 remnants of the British Empire which have the British monarch as their Head of State, depend on the UK for their defence and which all have coastlines. All are closer, geographically, to other sovereign nations than they are to the UK but all have strong cultural ties to…
Sunday book review – A Vulture Landscape by Ian Parsons
Ian Parsons has written more than 20 guest blogs here and so is a fairly familiar name to this blog’s readers. But when not writing for this blog he is a nature tour leader in Extremadura and this blog is about that land, west of Madrid and stretching to the Portuguese border, its wildlife and…
Sunday book review – Raptor Prey Remains by Ed Drewitt
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This is the type of book you will like if you like this type of book, or probably more likely, if you need this type of book. It is clearly a niche publication of most use to raptor workers who often visit the nests of raptors and want to identify the prey remains that they…