2 Jul 25 - A Wildlife Addiction - Other Wildlife Books

The previous Blog Post discussed some of the books I've been tweeting on Bluesky about, in response to a tweet from Martin Wood a few weeks ago. That Blog Post was focused on the Bird books in my library. In this Blog Post, I will look at some of the other wildlife books in my library.

The Bluesky Tweet that started everything: This included the text "Nature book challenge. A book per day, in no particular order, until you've shared all of the best nature, environment and conservation books in your personal library. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!"

Before I got into Birds at the start of my teens, I had already been interested in Frogs and Butterflies for several years. Finally, that expanded to include other Amphibians and Reptiles, when I finally saw a few more species beyond Common Frog.

My Amphibians and Reptile section has never got beyond this book: These days I've found that photos and internet searches are usually sufficient to identify a reasonable number of the Amphibians and Reptiles that I've seen abroad. Consequentially, I've never got around to look for an up to date book

My Collins Butterfly guide to the UK & Europe: I've not bought any of the recent Butterfly books for the UK & Europe, as there are plenty of good resources online for many species and I'm not spending enough time in Europe to justify buying better books

Another wildlife group that I became interested in about the same time that I got interested in Birds were Mammals. I've now found this really good Mammal handbook for the UK.

Mammals of the British Isles Handbook

Mammals are one of the groups that I've tried to identify on foreign trips, but with varying results depending on the country. One of my first trips outside of the Western Palearctic was to Kenya in 1987. I returned three years later as part of a four month African trip, visiting Kenya, Rwanda, a corner of Zaire, Uganda, Madagascar and Southern Africa. We had a chance to identify African Mammals as there were these good in their day books on African Mammals. But we had nothing on the Madagascan Lemurs where we had to rely on the researchers we met and some of the first local guides, they were training.

My early African field guides: The taxonomy was always a bit inconsistent in these and similar books, but at least they were generally good enough to get a name to the species seen

If this guide had been available in 1990, it would have spurred us on to look for more Lemurs

The reality is there are still a number of countries I've visited in recent years, where there still isn't a good Mammal field guide. But times have moved on and there is now the Handbook of the Mammals of the World. The only problem is I cannot justify spending the money to buy the eight volumes. But now there is a concise budget version of all the Mammal species, along with range maps.

The Illustrated Checklist of the Mammals of the World: One of the things I might do at some point in the future, is to go back through all my foreign Mammal sightings, now I have this comprehensive checklist

In the late 90s, the Poole Harbour Birders started the first of five annual ferry trips from Portsmouth to Bilboa through the Bay of Biscay. The first was designed for Seabirds and Cetaceans. I returned annually for the Cetaceans, with the Seabirds being a bonus. I had seen a few Cetaceans by this point, but we had struggled on foreign trips due to the lack of a decent Cetacean guide. So, it was a really breath of fresh air when Mark Carwardine published this excellent Cetacean guide, which was packed with lots of easily readable information. I was starting to get hooked on Cetaceans.

Carwardine's book helped to get me hooked on Cetaceans

Anybody who has regularly read my Blog Posts, will realise that I have a strong passion for Cetaceans, which I consider to be 'Honorary Penguins". My interest in Cetaceans kicked up a couple of notches during the seven week expedition trip from Ushuaia to Holland via South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension Island and Cape Verde. I discovered the Marine Mammals of the World handbook in the Plancius's library and immediately bought it when I returned home. I now have the digital version on my laptop and mobile. While the taxonomy has moved on in the last decade for a handful of species, it is still by far the best Cetacean guide in my opinion. There are newer pocket field guides, but they quickly flounder on some of the less common species of Cetacean.

Marine Mammals of the World: This also covers all the Pinnipeds, Manatees, Sea Otter & Polar Bear

In my early days at Southampton University, some of the Birders tried to get into Moths. This was hard work in those early days, as my two volume guide, was crap. However, things picked up when we bumped into John Chainey, who was living in Brockenhurst in those days. John has an amazing knowledge of Moths and helped get me started on Moths. Sadly, I'm rusty now I don't get the time to run my Moth trap. All this was helped by the first of the decent Moth books.

An early edition of Skinner's revolutionary Moth book

This book made Pyralids about the only Micro Moths I could attempt when I ran my Moth trap in the mid-80s

The Manley photo guide also covers all the UK Butterflies, as well as, a lot of caterpillars of both Moths and Butterflies

These two volumes with Richard Lewington's illustrations, along with some excellent online websites, have made Moths a lot easier to identify: However, none of these guides have helped to tackle the pain of a pre-dawn alarm clock to beat the local Birds to the Moths which didn't end up in the trap

About twenty years ago, I bought this book to try to get into Dragonflies. It is still a decent field guide, albeit the ranges will be out of date these days and some of the newer established species aren't covered.

The Dragonflies of Great Britain and Ireland: This was a good start into Dragonflies

More recent Dragonfly guides: These are all old editions now, but still perfectly adequate for identification, albeit the distribution will now be dated. The first guide also has an excellent large section of key Dragonflies sites to visit. This book helped me plan how to see the last of the British Dragonflies in a recent Scottish trip

As I've seen new Insect field guides published, I've tried to buy them, so I had a better chance of identifying species I bump into. There are still some major insect groups that still need a good book, starting with a field guide to UK Wasps. A Lewington illustrated book would be fantastic.

This excellent Shieldbug book is well worth checking out

Lewington's plates on Bees, along with some excellent text by Steven Falk, has made Bee identification a lot easier

This is a good Grasshopper and Cricket guide

A useful book for Dorset residents

Hoverflies are still a project waiting to start

Another strand of Bird and Wildlife books that I've enjoyed reading have been the travel diaries of some of the early naturalists. Everybody would immediately think of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. Personally, I found that a hard read.

Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle

I enjoyed the Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace a lot more. Not only was it an easier book to read, it also covers how he developed his ideas on evolution. It was only when he sent a write up of these ideas to Darwin, that Darwin rushed to write up his own observations on this topic, that he had avoided doing for many years. Both published their ideas at the same Royal Society meeting. Sadly, Wallace didn't have the same standing as Darwin in the class system at the time and today, most UK schoolkids have heard about Darwin, whilst few have heard of Wallace.

Wallace's Malay Archipelago

I managed to find a few other Victorian explorer travel books over the years. Any Birder who has travelled to Borneo will have heard of Charles Lowe and his gorgeous Hose's Broadbill: which I've been lucky enough to see in Sabah. This is his travel diary.

Hose's travel diary: He is best known this day for Hose's Broadbill and Black Oriole (Oriolus hosii)

The next book is a modern twist of those old Victorian explorer's travel books. It is a section of articles from researchers based upon Marion Island. While the Victorians killed Birds and Insects in the name of science, this book includes sections on the largest successful feral Cat eradication program and how the Wildlife recovered following their removal.

Pain Forms the Character: A book I still need to find the time to sit down and read

Been brought up on the Kent-London borders close to the River Thames, every now and then the name Jeffery Harrison cropped up. He was responsible for setting up the Sevenoaks Nature Reserve, but also was involved in the campaign to clean up the River Thames and with Peter Grant, he documented how the Wildlife returned. Sadly, Thames Water is doing its best to create the conditions for the sequel to this book.

The Thames Transformed by Jeffery Harrison and Peter Grant

I will end this Blog Post with another of my all-time favourite Bird and Wildlife books. Kakapo Country describes the early work to stop the enigmatic Kakapo from becoming extinct. But as well as describing the start of the recovery program, it looks at many of the other endemic Birds, along with other classic New Zealand species like the Weta and the habitats. It only took me a couple of hours to re-read the book last month, as the text is full of the same lovely paintings as are shown on the front cover.

Kakapo Country

I've enjoyed tweeting on Bluesky about some of the interesting books in my library and being able to expand on some of the reasons I selected those books in the last two Blog Posts. These are still only a subset of the library. One of the nice benefits has been these tweets have encouraged me to pull some of the non-identification guides off the book shelves and re-read them. Thanks for the inspiration, Martin.

29 Jun 25 - A Wildlife Addiction - Bird Books

As many Birders and Wildlife enthusiasts will confirm, their Wildlife interests can be addictive. A few weeks ago, local Birder Martin Wood posted the following tweet on Bluesky.

The Bluesky Tweet that started everything

This included the text "Nature book challenge. A book per day, in no particular order, until you've shared all of the best nature, environment and conservation books in your personal library. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!". In this Blog Post, I get to explain some of the books I've been tweeting about in response to Martin's tweet.

The AA Book of the British Countryside: My first general Wildlife book, which covered Birds, Insects, Flowers and anything else relating to the countryside

The AA Book of the British Countryside: The pages contained an A to Z of the British countryside

Martin's tweet tapped straight into my Bird book addiction. I've always loved books since I was a small kid. Early in my student days at Southampton University, I visited both the University library and the main city library. However, both left me feeling they didn't have that many good Bird and Wildlife books. But the reality was there were few decent Bird field guides or handbooks in those early days to stock. Additionally, any good guides couldn't be kept out on constant loan for reference purposes.

My early UK field guides and handbooks: There was also The Birds of the Western Palearctic. But that was beyond my student budget and new volumes were appearing too slowly to be useful, especially for tricky Passerines

There was only one answer to this problem: to start my own Bird and Wildlife book collection. By my second year, I had discovered a local secondhand book shop close to my student accommodation. I was a frequent visitor and occasionally, I left with some good books. But the size of the library at that point was constrained by the reality of having to survive on a student grant.

My first New World book: In hindsight, one of the few books I bought where the three quid I paid for it would have been better spent on booze

The mid-80s, saw the first of the Croom Helm monographs, when the Seabirds book was published.

The first edition of the Seabirds book: This volume is a bit battered after taking it on an extended two month trip to Australia and New Zealand. We decided that the existing field guides were inadequate for some of the Seabirds we were hoping to see

Over the next couple of decades there were several new family monographs published each year: virtually all of which were quickly snapped up. Knowing a mate who could source them at about thirty percent discount certainly helped in those days and I was also able to include quite a few other friends in those book orders.

The Seabirds book was the start of a lot of excellent family monographs from Croom Helm, Pica Press, OUP and Poyser

But there were some other significant family monographs available in the late 80s that were worth buying. Occasional visits to some of the top London bookshops helped, as well as, buying books at Oriental Bird Club meetings. The family monographs really helped as they provided a world view of a family or group of families, which helped to fill the gaps caused by some of the poor quality field guides that were the only option in those early days.

Parrots of the World: This is one of my favourite Bird books thanks to the great plates by William T Cooper, who is one of my favourite Bird artists

The Kea plate by William T Cooper: This book was published in the days before the current generation of excellent artists

By the late 80s, I was planning to give up my job in Autumn 1990 and go travelling around the world with my mate, Keith Turner. The logistics of that trip were complex. Firstly, there was the obvious one of deciding on a route. Next was pouring through many tens of Bird reports to condense that information into a couple of master notebooks of sites and species to target. But the other problem was the number of field guides we needed to carry. We made that a bit easier by planning a four month African and Madagascan leg, before returning to the UK.

Three of the four guides we used on the African leg: The book with the dull cover is the bulky, but not too heavy, Mackworth Praed and Grant West African Passerine handbook. This was useful when we visited Rwanda and the South West corner of Zaire: a corner of a country that hasn't been safe to visit for most of the last thirty-five years. The fourth book was Keith's French plates for the Birds of Madagascar. This was another country which didn't have a field guide in 1990. I also took an invaluable distribution guide for Madagascar

We starting again with the India Subcontinent, South East Asia, Hong Kong, Indonesian and Australian leg. Along the way, a trip into China was added. The logistics of weight were helped by the lack of the decent field guides we needed to carry and we could split those field guides between the two of us. To help with weight they were posted home after we had finished using them. Keith & I were able to spend a lot more time in each country before moving to the next country and this allowed us to build up a lot more experience of the Birds to make up for the poor quality of the field guides. We were also carrying photos of some of the plates from the first family monographs, as well as, from other field guides that we too heavy to carry.

Field guides for fifteen months Birding from India and Nepal, Hong Kong, China, to South East Asia, Indonesia and Australia

The country that presented the largest challenge was Indonesia. We visited Indonesia, including Irian Jaya (now West Papua) when few Birders had travelled away from Java and Bali. We covered all the main islands over three extended trips totally sixteen weeks. The only part of Indonesia we skipped was Kalimantan, as we spent about six weeks in Sabah over two trips. Irian Jaya should have been longer for me, but a motorbike accident left me unable to consider a second major trek to Wamena. The biggest challenge at the time was Wallacea, as the only available book was the BOU Checklist for Wallacea, with no descriptions or illustrations. There was no field guide for any of these endemic rich islands in those days.

The excellent BOU Checklist to Wallacea

We had a couple of useful reports for each of the main islands, there were few options in each family on any island and where there were options, the BOU Checklist provided details on locations, elevations etc. This was helped by a few sketches in a couple of the reports we had. I was taking descriptions of every species and when I checked all those descriptions against the excellent Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago, I found only two or three species that we had misidentified.

The excellent Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago: This is one of my favourite field guides

By the start of the millennium, I had itchy feet and I decided I needed to go travelling again on another long trip. Fortunately, I was aware that IBM would allow employees to request up to a year of sabbatical leave. My plan was to travel for a year from Oct 2001 to the Philippines, New Zealand and its Subantarctic Islands, to zig-zag across multiple Pacific islands before reaching the New World: with stops in Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru and Chile. Fortunately, all of these countries had a field guide, but I was also carrying laminated photos of plates from other useful handbooks like The Birds of South America and The Birds of the High Andes. This was an enhancement on the original photos I had carried on previous trips. Whilst heavier and bulkier, they were waterproof, which the original photos weren't.

The Birds of South America: It was good that they started on the Passerine volumes, but a pity they never published the Non Passerine volumes

The Birds of the High Andes: This is another excellent handbook but too heavy and expensive to put in a rucksack

Around this time, the wonderful Handbook of the Birds of the World started being published. When I travelled to Brazil in 2004, we were carrying laminated scanned images of all the relevant plates from those volumes that had been published, as Sick's Brazil guide was so poor. But I wasn't going to wait for a decent field guide as I was wanting to see a Sharpbill: which was the only Bird family I hadn't seen by that point. That at least was easy to identify, albeit we probably threw one of two more tricky species away, due to the lack of a decent field guide. Unfortunately, since that date, about another fifteen Bird families have been split and there are still eight I've yet to connect with: but that's another story.

The excellent Handbook of the Birds of the World series

Moving closer to the current date, Birders have it easy these days as virtually every country now has an excellent field guide for the country or region, not to mention a plethora of tour operators and guides to take them around their chosen country. Albeit trying to follow the same route that we covered in the 1990 - 1992 Round the World trip, would result in bags being vastly heavier than the average of about forty-five kilos we somehow managed to smuggle past the airport check-in staff. I won't photograph any of these modern field guides, as they can easily be found in any of the online sites selling decent Bird books today.

The Birding Frontiers Challenge Series from the late Martin Garner is another excellent series: It was a real loss to the Birding community to lose Martin and a shame that nobody was brought in to continue this series

Another interesting and unique book concept came from the Sound Approach. This series of Bird books focused on European species and their vocalisations. The books came with CDs, so you could listen to the songs of the species they were discussing.

The Sound Approach books

Another ground-breaking series came from Bob Flood and Ashley Fisher, where the books are packed with detailed information, good photos and accompanying DVDs containing videos at sea.

The Seabird series from Bob Flood and Ashley Fisher

I will end this Blog Post with another favourite Bird book: the sixteen inch high Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds, which is another book illustrated by William T Cooper.

The Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds

The Wilson's Bird of Paradise plate: This remains the best Bird I've seen, despite only watching a sub-adult male displaying. Keith & I were some of the first independent Birders to go looking for Wilson's Bird of Paradise and before any of the tour companies started taking punters into the area

There are plenty of other Wildlife books in the library. I will cover some of them in the next Blog Post.

11 Jun 25 - Nice & Rosy

It was a good day to be volunteering on the DWT Brownsea reserve. Finally, it was a warm and sunny day, with a dry South Easterly wind. Albeit that wind produced a bit of mist in the morning, but not enough mist to cause a real problem to watch the lagoon. It was good to see the Sandwich Tern and Common Tern chicks were doing well, albeit I didn't take any photos. As I was scanning the lagoon, I saw a white Tern flying off the lagoon, that was too small to be a Sandwich Tern. It was always back on until I lost it. It looked interesting and I thought I had probably just had to let a Roseate Tern go. But there was every chance it would return after fishing.

Roseate Tern with a Common Tern: Not a great photo, but the Boomerang Island is one hundred and sixty metres from the Avocet hide

I was in the new Lookout hide and visitor centre at lunchtime, when I had a couple of free minutes between visitors to have a scan of the Boomerang Island. This is generally the island where visiting, non-breeding Terns settle down among the resting local Terns. The small, whiter Tern had returned and it was looking good for a Roseate Tern. Whiter in colouration with an all-black bill. It was breast on, but finally it turned and I could see the whiter primaries and tail. That was good enough to confirm the identification.

Roseate Tern with a Common Tern: This individual didn't have particularly long tail feathers

This individual didn't have the normal long tail feathers. So, it was probably the same individual that Graham Armstrong had found on 7 Jun, but which hadn't been seen since. Not too surprising as Roseate Terns are generally one-day individuals. It was unusual that it was still around and presumably had just been overlooked in the intervening days.

Common Tern: This individual was resting just in from of the Avocet hide: It's a pity that the Roseate Terns just check out the Common Tern colonies, instead of just sitting on the Boomerang Island