With lockdown two lifted, bookshops that survived Covid breaks threw open their doors. These shops need cash to keep going and the intoxicating smell of new books plus the feel of virgin pages surely outshines internet shopping. There’s still time to visit and purchase Christmas gifts from among the outstanding natural history publications of 2020.
Here’s a reminder of the best books I saw this year. Busy Princeton produced several additions to their highly-acclaimed WildGuides series with revised identification guides to Britain's Birds, Butterflies and Spiders and new books on Britain’s Orchids and Europe’s Dragonflies.
Wild Things: Britain's Orchids review
All maintained high standards set by this Oxfordshire-based publisher with amazing photographs, profiles and distribution maps. The robin photograph on the front of the bird guide looks slightly mundane but you can’t judge a book by the cover and there are plenty of exciting illustrations inside.
It’s hard to find fault except these comprehensive field guides may feel rather heavy on a long walk.
Among good reads on natural history I have seen this year is another Princeton publication. Britain’s Habitats by Sophie Lake, Durwyn Liley, Robert Still and Andy Swash discusses the composition and development of British countryside through the ages and prospects for its future.
Isabella Tree’s Wilding appeared in Picador paperback. The story of how Isabella and her husband transformed their struggling farm into a nature reserve with nationally significant populations of nightingales, turtle doves, purple emperor butterflies and white storks is enthralling as an Agatha Christie thriller.
Wild Things: Britain's Butterflies review
Ross Barnett unravels a similar theme in The Missing Lynx(Bloomsbury) by discussing how extinct British animals such as wolves and lynx could roam the countryside again.
These titles were narrowly eclipsed by Matthew Oates’ His Imperial Majesty as my wildlife read of the year. The book traces Oates’ 50-year obsession with the purple emperor butterfly mixing fact, humour and eccentricity. Oates often gives his butterfly target a name. So purple-clad Oates could once be found chasing Alastair Cook through an oakwood while the name's genuine owner compiled a century at The Oval. Top stuff !
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