Eric Brown is back with more musings to help make wildlife lovers of us all.

Many photographs that accompany my column have been donated by Tony Dunstan, an enthusiastic amateur photographer who lived in Eltham before moving to deepest Kent.

Tony, a long-term friend, prowls wildlife habitats on the lookout for subjects while wielding his Nikon D90 camera.

It was with this that he captured the fantastic shot published here of a ruff landing. Geddit?!

The photograph won a competition and was selected to appear on the front of the RSPB Canterbury Group 2019 calendar which is already sold out.

Tony told me it was taken at 1/2000sec @ f5.6 though I’ve no idea what this means.

Wildlife photography is among topics discussed in a new book devoted to nature watching in urban environments.

Readers of a certain age will recall books written by television personality Tony Soper back when tweeting was strictly for the birds.

Those books offered advice on how to string peanuts together by pulling a string through their shells before putting them out to feed birds, how to make wooden nestboxes, how to attract wildlife to your garden and which binoculars to choose.

I still have my 80 pence copy published in the early 1970s.

David Lindo has updated Soper’s idea and added a whole lot more now that wildlife watching has developed enormously.

In his book How to be an Urban Birder Lindo demonstrates that the vocabulary of wildlife watching has totally changed since Soper wrote his original text shortly after England won the World Cup.

Tweeting, as well as texting, is now essential for wildlife enthusiasts in a world where apps, phonescoping, woodcrete nestboxes and digiscoping are commonplace.

Angled telescopes have replaced old-fashioned drawtube jobs more suitable for a ship’s captain and there’s a whole shelf full of roof prism binoculars available instead of old porro-prism models.

Lindo also offers advice on how to watch in urban environments when scanning with binoculars near a school or someone’s bedroom window may be misconstrued.

Excellent reading for all wildlife lovers.

How to be an Urban Birder by David Lindo is published by Princeton price £14.99.