To mark the anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war. In Wings over the Western Front (Day Books), the illustrated wartime diaries of gardener and birdwatcher Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram have been ably edited by Ernie Pollard and Hazel Strouts. Another figure from that terrible conflict is commemorated in Edward Thomas: Birdsong & Flight, by Judy Kendall (Cecil Woolf), which examines the poet’s profound fascination with birds.
This year also marks another anniversary: the death of the last passenger pigeon, Martha, in Cincinnati Zoo on 1st September 1914. The extraordinary tale of a species whose vast flocks darkened the skies of North America, before it was annihilated in just half a century, is well told in The Passenger Pigeon by Errol Fuller (Princeton), and A Message from Martha by Mark Avery (Bloomsbury). Both draw the inevitable conclusion that no species can be considered so common that it is safe from extinction.
The fortunes of Britain’s birds of prey are outlined in two thoughtful books. In A Sparrowhawk’s Lament (Princeton), David Cobham reviews the contrasting fortunes of all 15 species of Britain’s breeding birds of prey, charting their comeback following the banning of DDT, which had pushed several species to the brink of dying out. A similar story is told by Ed Drewitt in Urban Peregrines (Pelagic), a book that documents the extraordinary revival of the fastest creature on the planet, which now breeds in almost every major British city.
City wildlife was well covered this year, with Andrew Self’s The Birds of London (Bloomsbury); John F Burton’s charming memoir of a naturalist’spostwar childhood, Grey Daggers and Minotaurs in Greenwich Park (Clio); and the long-awaited New Naturalist volume Nature in Towns and Cities, by David Goode (Collins), probably the finest work on urban ecology ever written.
Nature is often most fascinating when studied in forensic detail. Few people do that more brilliantly than two Guardian country diarists, Paul Evans and Mark Cocker. Evans’s Herbaceous (Little Toller) is an intense celebration of colour in plants through the seasons, while Cocker’s Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet (Jonathan Cape) includes many of his evocative missives from that Norfolk village.
Another Norfolk resident, wildlife film-maker Martin Hayward Smith, has produced My Year With Hares (martinhaywardsmith.com) a beautifully illustrated account of his obsession with this mysterious countryside resident.
Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis Stempel (Doubleday) focuses on an even smaller canvas: it’s a detailed account of a year in the life of an English meadow, written by a man deeply connected to the small patch of land where he lives and farms. Another field features in Dave Goulson’s A Buzz in the Meadow (Vintage), which tells the story of how the author created a home for insects in the French countryside.
Those who feel they might need a good practical guide to miniature worlds need look no further than Paul D Brock’s A Comprehensive Guide to Insects of Britain and Ireland (Pisces). For once the publisher’s hype is justified: this book really will enable you to identify virtually every insect you are likely to come across, from bees to beetles, moths to mayflies and ants to ant lions, all thanks to its excellent photographs and clear, concise and authoritative text.
Detail is also the watchword for A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects (Bloomsbury), by David Callahan and Dominic Mitchell, which uses a familiar format to tell the story of how we came to watch birds in a new and quirky way. Its episodic layout makes for perfect bedtime reading, as do Shrewdunnit: The Nature Files by Conor Mark Jameson (Pelagic), A Guide to Scots Bird Names by Robin Jackson (Ptarmigan) – a comprehensive list of the many folk names for birds north of the border – and Savannah Diaries (Bradt) by the incomparable travel writer Brian Jackman.
This Christmas, the global travellers among us will probably be hoping to get Handbook of the Mammals of the World, Volume 4: Sea Mammals or Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World, Volume 1: Non-Passerines (both Lynx). If they do, they will need a specially reinforced stocking. These are big books. At €160 and €185 respectively, they may seem pricey, but given the level of scholarship, the standard of illustrations and the importance of the contents, they are excellent value for money.
Another epic volume, The World of Birds (Natural History Museum), by Jonathan Elphick and with photographs by David Tipling, may appear to be yet another coffee-table book on birds, but it is far more than that. The specialist researcher on Birds Britannica has written a brilliantly detailed, wide-ranging guide to every aspect of the way birds live their lives. Whatever you want to know about bird behaviour, distribution, physiology or classification, you can find it somewhere in these 600 pages.
The flourishing genre of naturebased memoirs is represented by Cold Blood, by Richard Kerridge (Chatto & Windus). Subtitled “Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians”, this is a funny, moving and compulsively readable account of the author’s boyhood obsession with these often neglected creatures.
But for my nature book of the year, I must agree with the judges of the Samuel Johnson prize. Helen Macdonald’s incredible H Is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape) is a truly original mixture of memoir, nature writing, and a blow-by-blow account of training a goshawk as a way of dealing with the grief following her father’s death. It is, as the flyleaf predicts, destined to become a classic of nature writing. Macdonald’s father would have been justly proud.
• To order these titles with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to bookshop.theguardian.com.
