This book is about a bird which seems to be trying quite hard to go extinct but which was, about a century ago, a very familiar part of the countryside throughout the UK. The Corncrake is a bird that once lived in long grass and other dense vegetation right across Europe and into Asia…
Tag: Whittles
Sunday book review – The Birds are our Friends by Yessengali Raushanov
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This is an interesting book – a translation of a book by the Kazakh poet Yessengali Raushanov who died last year. The book is organised by species, over 30 species of bird, many of which are familiar to a UK audience, with a few extra bird-related essays included too. One learns something of the folklore,…
Sunday book review – Birding in an Age of Extinction by Martin Painter.
This is a good read if you are a birder or if you’ve ever chased after a rare bird anywhere in the world. The author has done a bit of that, with what appears to be the usual mixture of success and failure. He has travelled widely and visited such places as remote Norfolk Island…
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 – 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 – 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 – Shorebirds in Action by Richard Chandler
Shorebirds in Action: An introduction to waders and their behaviour, by Richard Chandler Reviewed by Ian Carter I’m a big fan of books that blend photography and the written word, though they sometimes struggle to reach their full potential. So often, it seems, photos are added to books almost as an afterthought, simply to help…