I grew up in Somerset where Buzzards were reasonably common but are now much more numerous, but I’ve spent most of the last 40 years living in the East Midlands and seen Buzzards becoming commoner and commoner sights in the skies here. Buzzards are fairly common across most of lowland Britain nowadays but holes still…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes
This is my type of book. In fact, you could say it is right up my street given the quote on page 121 which points out that the Boughton Estate now sells firewood back to the commoners at £95 per cubic metre when once it was a right to collect such wood. That’s the source…
Sunday book review – Snared by Bob Berzins
As regular readers of this blog will know, Bob Berzins has written several guest blogs here, mostly about goings on in the Peak District but also about other upland areas. This book, written by Bob Berzins, published by Bob Berzins and, because I can’t find an acknowledgement to anyone else in the book, probably the…
Sunday book review – Uplands and Birds by Ian Newton
This is a monumental book of over 600 pages. It is everything one would expect from one of the UK’s greatest ornithologists; breadth, depth and clarity. This book, the author stresses, is about the uplands and about birds, but it isn’t just about upland birds. That’s true, but it is very birdy nonetheless. It acts…
Sunday book review – Cottongrass Summer by Roy Dennis
This book, out of 40+ I reviewed in 2020, was one of two titles 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…
Sunday book review: Pudding-Pokes, Flittermice and Bishy-Barney-Bees by Susan Brewer
This is essentially an alphabetical list of species names and a few other rural terms. What’s in a name? If I told you that I get Apple Birds, Aizacks, Woofells and Wrannocks in my garden, as well as Spadgers and Jacobs would you still be with me? Well, I do. These old, largely unused, mostly…
Sunday book review – Imperial Mud by James Boyce
This book goes straight into my shortlist of books of the year for 2020: no doubt about it. I wish I had written this book but since I didn’t, I’m very glad that someone else did so that I could read it. I guess I am sounding enthusuastic about it – I am. It’s a…
Sunday book review – Rock Pool by Heather Buttivant
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Here in east Northants we are a bit lacking in coastal habitats and my nearest coast is muddy and sandy rather than rocky. If I lived at the coast I would love to explore the wildlife making its living, or temporarily made captive in the pools between the tidelines. As the author explains here so…
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 think of John, who I will…
Sunday book review – Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian
This is as much an exploration of how we, people, interact or not with nature as it is about nature. The author talks to people and observes them as he watches nature and visits places associated with former greats such as Peter Scott, Gilbert White, John Clare, Etta Lemon, Thomas Bewick and the tangled bank…