Standing up for Nature
While breakfasting on 14 January, I glanced out the window and saw a Merlin flash past over my Northamptonshire garden at fence-top height. The sighting might have been an eighth of a second or perhaps less but our smallest falcon was unmistakable and put a smile on my face for the rest of the…
This is a terrific book – highly recommended! I could stop there but maybe you’d like to know a bit more. The author writes beautifully and I knew he had me after the first two pages of the Prologue. I’d bet that the author makes a good first impression in person too, but he certainly…
Forty years ago I shared an office in Oxford with the author of this book and he had, even then, clocked up an impressive range of island visits. He has kept going ever since and this book chronicles visits to islands in all five of Earth’s oceans. Mike Brooke’s visits to islands ranged from very…
We might think of night in a similar way to the way we think about winter – something to be endured to get out the other side to better times. Leigh Ann Henion might just persuade you that it’s worth doing a few all-nighters to enjoy nocturnal wildlife as her book celebrates the night and…
I like this book which we bought recently in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens for our Edinburgh grandson. He likes books with animals in them, and he likes books with flaps that he can turn over. I like books with those characteristics too. This one caught my attention by having a realistic Grey Squirrel in it,…
This book is about the relationship between neurodivergent people and the natural world. I found it interesting and probably more interesting than I thought it might be. The author is neurodivergent (diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and does a very good job in explaining, from the start of the book, what are the…
This New Naturalist of 530 pages is about one of the three upland National Parks in southwest England – you get a better view of the sea (and, on a clear day, of Wales) from this one than from the other two and it has the distinct advantage, from my biased point of view, of…
This book, out of 50 I reviewed in 2025, was my choice of wildlife book of the year. 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 affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you…
This book takes us from Agapostemon to Zacosmia although that may not be the most helpful introduction from me as it suggests that this book is perhaps dull and worthy whereas it is fun and interesting. I enjoyed reading about the links of Danuncia Urban (bee taxonomist) and Charles Michener (another bee taxonomist) with bees…
Like many biologists, I have a dose of physics-envy born out of fear of physics. At school, I could cope quite well with mechanics because that felt like snooker writ large but when it came to forces, energy and electricity it all was a bit much for me. And so it was with mixed feelings,…