United States
£ GBP
Stephen Moss' "This Birding Life" was universally acclaimed for one of the most irresistibly beautiful and colourful jackets to grace any book that year. This follow-up volume features another such jacket by the doyen of bird artists, Robert Gillmor (whose linocut illustrations also adorn all the Collins New Naturalist books).
The new book retains everything that reviewers liked about "This Birding Life" - its easy, good-humoured style, its combination of a wide birding knowledge with the gift of making things interesting for the general reader - and applies it to a simple concept. Stephen Moss began on 1 January 2007, to chronicle each species of bird as he was seeing it for the first time last year, and continued to do so until 31 December. He writes about what he saw, where he saw it, who he was with, what it made him think and feel - the little story of each birdwatching episode, be it goldfinches on his garden feeder, seeing hen harriers nesting underneath a bridge in Glasgow, or the extraordinary rescue of a rare albatross on a Somerset beach.
The result is both a unique chronicle of Britain's natural history and a touching and funny piece of autobiography - a year of life measured out in birds.
