CHICK BOOKS

Published by Oxford University Press hard back, Pages 452 Price £30.00 This is an amazing book which takes you back to Greek and Roman times and how they saw the bird life around them. Extracts from written work all those years ago show birds in everyday life and how the writers of the day portrayed them. Features like vultures following armies waiting for their breakfast of the dead soldiers compared to mistletoe berries made into bird lime to catch the birds for consumption

Published by Square Peg, Hardback Price £17.99 and new softback 2018 £9.99, 264pages Anyone can see that the title could be ‘landscapes’ but the fact that most of our country is crisscrossed with lines from roads, canals, hedges, power lines and trains tells you what the book is about. Hugh has a history of working on lines with his Hedgehog biology. How many gardens have wiggly boundaries? This book brings together up to date information how the many authorities working in s

Published by New Holland, paper back, 224 pages, Price £14.99 A great book for someone loving fresh water and spending time by it but not knowing what is out there in the wildlife. A section on all types of species from plants to mammals to fish but the dragonfly section was ideal for covering many species found around the Uk. Many of the birds were unlikely to visit your pond but having said that rivers are mentioned. The large pictures give ideal ID features but then limits

This may be a recent edition to my book collection but what was amazing it turned out to be even more to where I lived. I review books for magazines so reading this book was a job I like best especially as most/all the books contain wildlife. This book was about bird names and how they came about. The author Stephen Moss had first seen the name of this bird when he was 9 years old and had kept it in his memory all that time until writing this book and naming it after this bi

Published by Pelagic Publishing, Hard back, 342 pages Price £24.99 How many books can say ‘by the time you have read this book 3 species will have gone extinct on earth! What a book which is packed with so much information. This tells the story of where all those birds we love have come from in time. There are so many features you will learn from reading this book like ‘let’s go to Antarctica to look for fossils’. Where have the sex organ gone in birds? Short tailed Albatros

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, hardback, 356 pages, Price £25.00 This is the story of Francis Willughby who had been lost to science with little written about him in modern times. Tim Birkhead had a chance encounter with distant relatives of the man when working on another book. These relatives were sure their relative had been written out of history by a good friend John Ray who had taken all the credit for the work done by Francis producing books on birds and fish. Ti

Published by Princeton [Wild Guides], Flexibound, 224 pages Price £20.00 A great book to take on holiday as it covers really everything you are likely to see from the endemic birds to dragonflies, mammals and even butterflies. These isles are not getting the attention of say the Azores and size may be the problem as birders will have to keep tabs on such a large area but visitors will relish the habitats which are so unique with especially the Laurel forests with their own pi

Published by Cicerone, paperback, Pages 124, Price £12.95 This book gives you a wide variety of walks where wildlife can be seen. Although a walking guide sites like Lindisfarne, Low Newton and Greenlee Lough are all well known birding spots. Areas like the Cheviots and North Pennines have their breeding wading birds and birds of prey while the coast has its fair share of winter migrants and sea bird colonies. You would have to pick and choose when to do a walk if wildlife wa

Published by Cicerone Press Soft back 192 pages Price £14.95 This 215 mile [347km] walk passes through several good areas for wildlife watching starting at Port Patrick itself with its famous tame Black Guillemots along with Fulmar and Eider nesting close by. Castle Kennedy has its wildfowl and that great winter when a White tailed Eagle was found there having come down from Mull. The Galloway Forest has Red Deer, Pine Martens and Wild Goats. The Moffat area will see Golden

Published by Cirerone paperback 208 pages price £12.95 This is an area full of wildlife starting with the limestone of the Orton area with its rare flora and limestone paving. Then you have the Lune itself with the famous other Borrowdale with mixed woodland and great flora not forgetting an autumn run of salmon to view at Lune Bridge. Moving onto Sedbergh you have its steep valleys with native woodland with Redstarts and Pied Flycatchers. The bat caves of Kirby Longsdale add