Books of the Year: Wildlife: Help Satisfy Your Natural Curiosity with Wild Reads

Summary

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FOR all the budding ornithologists out there, it will be hard to beat the RSPB Handbook of Scottish Birds (Christopher Helm, GBP 9.99) by Peter Holden and Stuart Housden as a stocking-filler this Christmas. It's not intended as a field guide - filling that gap is Jonathan Elphick and John Woodward's RSPB Pocket Birds of Britain and Europe (Christopher Helm, GBP 8.99), which I've enjoyed using this year - but it is meant to be used as a key for unlocking the secrets of the bird world. I can picture a time, maybe 30 years hence, when we hear naturalists explaining that their interest in birds was sparked by this very title. The distribution maps are particularly useful - as you would expect, since they cover just Scotland, there's much more detail than you'd find in a UK-wide guide.

If you're a more experienced birdwatcher and are looking for a book to stretch your ornithological interests then the third edition of Lee Evans's Ultimate Site Guide to Scarcer British Birds (BirdGuides, GBP 24.99) is a good next step on your journey towards full twitcher status. While birders are content to trundle through their local patch, twitchers will drive, cycle or even fly up and down the country to see rare birds. Evans's guide fits snugly into the gap between the two extremes. In Scotland we often forget how lucky we are, but Evans reminds us just how many rare species we have on our doorstep. The text is clear and well laid-out but it would be useful to have more maps and perhaps some photographs of sites.

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Books of the Year: Wildlife: Help Satisfy Your Natural Curiosity with Wild Reads

While Lee Evans's name may only be familiar to birdwatchers, one man who is now recognisable to millions of television ...

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