Helm Field Guide, 256 pages Price £30.00 This is the first comprehensive field guide of its kind to cover the whole island of Cyprus with more than 400 [405!] species with 95 colour plates. Not only is an identification book but a ‘where to watch’ book as well covering the best birding sites as well as the best habitats to see them. The breeding birds can be around 95 species with some found nowhere else in the world like the Cyprus Pied Wheatear and the Cyprus Warbler. Selling bird watching to locals and tourists can help to protect rare species/habitats and show how incomes can be made ‘out of season’ for many people involved with wildlife tourism.
Poyser Hardback - £60.00 and paperback - £35.00 304 pages It is like buses coming along. Tubbs Buzzard came out in 1974 and after a long wait we have 2 books in five years with Dare’s ‘The life of Buzzard in 2015 and now this one. This book is so different to the 2015 book with the authors often taking another line on how Buzzards should be managed! Wallis and Kenwood claim that this raptor could be the commonest BOP in the world through their work but don’t add that expansions of Eagle Owl and White tailed Eagle could have an effect on the Buzzard’s numbers with 16 young Buzzards being brought to just one White tailed Eagle nest as food. Buzzards fell 50% in the Black Forest in Germany when
549 pages, Price £35.00 Hardback With more and more folk getting into other forms of wildlife along with birds this book offers you the chance to look up all those things you wanted to know about when exploring the British Isles. The book starts with abbreviations and acronyms while part one are terms and part two the organisms with a good reference section at the back. Just flicking through I came across ‘Glue Fungus’ which I just happened to be shown on a Nature Scotland tour on Islay this January by my youngest son, Ewan while visiting the RSPB reserve of Loch Gruinart. Ewan has his eye on this species having found it on Mull while hunting for ‘Glove Fungus’ [a Mull speciality also on the
Published by Oxford University Press, Hard back 228 pages. £20.00 I just loved this book as it took me back to my work on Ancient Egyptian birds and Roman Birds. These folk were real lovers of the environment they lived in and although I have not seen the list of the birds found in their caves they lived in, many were for their enjoyment. The great work by the team down at Gibraltar makes this book alive and where these folk were once thought of being far more primitive than humans new light shows them as not. They may have even added flowers to their funerals! May be the folk who care for this world have more DNA from the Neanderthal than those who seem to want to destroy it!
