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. Many birds were featured in Mosaics with sites like Pompey were filled with the birds of their time preserved under all that ash for us to enjoy now. Jeremy has really done his ‘home work’ leaving no Cuckoo missed out
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 some breath taking acreage of habitat can be part of the modern thinking of helping conserve wildlife and habitats. Even the sub stations of power lines were helping to hold onto some species often threatened by modern da
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 the amount of information you could need to properly know the species and what it does. This book is ideal for any one lazing about by water.
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 bird. What is different from most names of birds after people was that this was a female but described as ‘Mrs’. Other bird names like Eleanora’s Falcon is after Eleanor of Arborea, Queen and national heroine of Sardinia,
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 Albatross living in the Atlantic to ‘Birds of Paradise’ named due to them not having legs! Many white birds have black wing tips to strengthen their feathers! Finally Great Auks off the Farne Isles in the future! Read on.
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. Tim went to work to unearth lots of new interesting information about Francis and his family from all those years ago in the 17th Century. Will there be a change in one of our bird names due to Tim’s extensive investigatio
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 pigeons! John himself lives on an island [Tiree] and loves the challenge of spotting all the species on these islands and many more he has visited around the world.
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 was your main aim but there is plenty of history around many of the walks with castles, forts, burial sites and even cup and ring stones to look for to keep you interested. Ideal for short and long walks.
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 Eagles released in 2019 making the area a must for views of Scotland’s iconic bird. The rewilding taking place in the area by the Borders Forest Trust at such areas of the Beef Tub, Core Heag, Carrifran , Talla , Gamesho
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 to the excitement of the area along with valleys full of Whinchats and Tree Pipits. Arkholme starts to see the wild Swans and geese in winter while the Lancaster area is full of rich walks full of warblers, dragonflies
Published by Princeton Paperback, 232 pages Price £14.99 As a country boy I was interested to see what I had to do to become an Urban Birder! Well of course I would have to live there first and get into a way of looking at things in a different light like using binoculars when there were crowds of people and be happy with the habitats that still existed in an urban setting. The book showed that there was plenty of bird species to look for from rubbish tips to canals and even from tall buildings. I loved many of the photos which had that urban setting like a Kingfisher with a bus stop and people behind! It was a good read and well priced so I am sure many of you will enjoy it.
