Standing up for Nature
There seems to have been something of a flood of very good books for me to review here recently, and here’s another one (and there are some more in the pipeline). Laurence Rose’s book is a thoughtful and well-informed look at nature conservation in the UK and every few pages I was thinking ‘That’s a…
This book is about an orchard and its wildlife. Month by month the two authors describe aspects of the orchard’s year. It sounds a nice place with its ancient trees and rich wildlife. As you travel through the pages then you may well wish you were there – I did. I enjoyed hearing about the…
Helen Pilcher writes with wit and clarity about life on Earth. This is a very good book, as was her previous book Bring Back the King (reviewed here). I think this one slightly has the edge but I’m glad to have both on my bookshelves and embedded in my thoughts. When I say that she…
I’m reading two books at the moment, both by authors I like and admire for their work so far. And both authors are short-listed for the Wainwright Prize for Global Conservation which will announce its winner (of a £5000 prize) on 9 September. The first of my two current reads is Life Changing by Helen…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…