Standing up for Nature
Those who enjoy Ian Carter’s writing, and very many of us do, will enjoy this latest work about his new home in Galloway. Ian encounters new species, new names and introduces us to his new surroundings. The author’s move from Devon was motivated partly by a yearning for wildness and from his fairly remote new…
This book is by friends, colleagues and family of Donald Watson, the artist and writer who passed away in 2005. I can’t review it as I wrote a glowing Foreword for the book itself and was delighted and felt honoured to be asked. This book of nine chapters, by seven authors, brought a person I…
Nicholas Milton is a productive author and this is the fifth of his books I’ve reviewed here. The Role of Birds in World War One, The Role of Birds in World War Two and The Secret Life of the Adder were published in 2022 and followed Neville Chamberlain’s Legacy in 2019. I’ve rated all of his books highly…
This book is published in Ireland but it looks to me that there is much of value and interest in it to many farmers in the UK. This impression is reinforced by favourable comments from some Brits including the suggestion from Martin Lines, CEO of Nature Friendly Farming UK, that all farmers should have this…
This book brings together a selection of extinct species, many that have been pushed to global extinction in living memory or at least recently enough to have touched human culture, and tells their stories. In some cases they are given a voice to tell their own stories. It’s a compilation of 30 species (or…
The author walks from the Gwent Levels in the south to Prestatyn in the north of Wales, not by the shorter route of skirting England but by the longer one of keeping salty water to one side. This isn’t the only book of a coastal walk that I am reading right now – there is…
I have reviewed 52 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might give you some ideas and I’ve whittled it down to a shortlist of 10 books that most impressed me…
Stephen Moss is an author and naturalist based in Somerset. Having retired from running the MA Nature and Travel Writing at Bath Spa University he is now a Visiting Research Fellow there. Stephen’s latest books are the 2023 Wainwright-Prize-shortlisted Ten Birds that Changed the World (Guardian Faber) and The Starling: a Biography (Square Peg), the…
This is a handbook and I think it will be a very useful handbook for local authority planners and ecologists who want to do a good job for nature. It is not a book to read for pleasure but that’s simply because it’s a book to read for information and knowledge. For example, Chapter 5’s…
This is a lovely book – beautiful trees, photographed well (it helps that they don’t run around I guess) and in gorgeous surroundings. Fifty types of tree from across the world are selected and that simple idea works very well. We are given portraits of individual trees and landscapes clothed in their masses as well…