5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It took me a while to work out the best place to see swifts here in Dorset, there are rarely above my house. Instead, I found them near the River Stour that I spent many hours by during the first lockdown. They were very high up and I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention as I was enjoying the sunset more. First I thought the black shapes were bats, but when I looked closely I realised that they were moving far too quickly to be bats, not only that they rarely flapped their wings. Then I looked properly.

Swifts!

They were collecting bugs at dusk and swooping and banking in their distinct way. hey were such a joy to watch that I missed the sun dropping behind the trees that night. I even tried to take some photos on my phone, but they don’t half shift!

I am not that obsessed by them compared to other people, Lev Parikian for example, or the author of this book, Charles Foster, but I can see why they both are. The arrival of swifts back in the country is a marvel of the natural world over the modern world. Waiting for Swifts to return from their African journey is probably worse than waiting for Christmas, at least we know when that day is even though it seems so far away when you’re seven. We don’t actually know what day they will fill our skies with their screaming.

Their power freedom and joy are the way everything really is – though we don’t usually see it. It is just when the swifts scream through the sky, you can’t miss it. That is how everything, all the time, is meant to be.

The first line of this book is: This is an account of an obsession. And he is not wrong either. He begins his story in January in Africa. He is full of snake and gassy African beer watching the swifts hunt for their insect food, swirling around his head so fast that the fuzziness from the alcohol means that he has trouble keeping up with them. They are masters of the air, so much so that they almost never land, always on the move, sleeping, feeding continually and even mating on the wing. The only time they touch down is to nest, lay eggs and feed their brood.

Like most animals they are under threat, In the uniquely British way we have tidied things up and the nooks and crannies that they used for their young have disappeared leaving very little options for nesting. Couple that with the desire to drench every living thing with some sort of insecticide, they are struggling to find the food that they need. To say we need to do more is a mantra that needs repeating endlessly; once they are gone they will not be coming back.

In April we find Foster in Spain, waiting on the top of a cliff for them the pass. He has been there a week and is beginning to hate the coffee, all he wants is a glimpse of them as they pass. As much as he looks though, he never sees them, until there is that scimitar flash in the very edge of his peripheral vision. They are here, passing onto the next landmark on the way home; except the UK isn’t really their home. The season of summer is where they live and they move back and forth across the planet.

‘They’re birds, for Christ’s sake!’ an ex-friend helpfully reminds me, trying to bring me back down to earth. But it’s no good: the swifts aren’t down to earth at all.

Charles Foster doesn’t like to follow convention, something that you will discover if you read, Being A Beast. His prose has an intensity that you rarely find these days; it is like having a double espresso directly in through the eyeballs! His passion, sorry obsession, about these birds is almost addictive and is starting to rub off on his family too. This is a wonderful book about these aerial wizards of the skies and the stunning sketches and artwork by Jonathan Pomeroy make this a perfect book.

4 out of 5 stars

If you were to compress the entire life span of the earth on a clock face, then humanity would only appear in the final two minutes. The two hundred thousand years that we have been around as a species is almost no time at all compared to the 4.5 billion years that the earth has existed as a planet.

For most people getting a grip of how vast geological or deep time, takes a lot of doing. Ten thousand years ago, a mere moment in this timescale, we were still connected to mainland Europe. To see this deep time laid out before us we need to look at the rocks.

Helen Gordon has an obsession with one type of rock, chalk. She had headed out of London to the North Downs just to get some space and thinking time. Near Caterham, she came across a board explaining that the ground she was standing on was once the bed of an ocean around the time of the dinosaurs. Amazed, she decided to find out more so when back in London headed to the Natural History Museum. She looked at the dusty exhibits and wanted to know more. Books on geology led to field trips learning more about the rocks below our feet that tell the story of the deep time of our country and planet.

Finding out more will take her from the glamour of Cambridge Heath Road, to see ice cores in Copenhagen, the Siccar Point to see the place where a man called James Hutton had looked at the granites and sandstones and realised that the earth was much, much older than 75,000 years. She heads to the deserts of America to see where dinosaurs once trod and spends time in Naples learning about volcanos.

I really enjoyed this. If you want a well written and nicely balanced introduction to the field of geology and deep time you cannot go wrong starting with this book. Gordon mages to make this vast subject approachable and also reminds us that we are a mere footnote in history, the planet will continue with or without us.

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Linda Gask has had an interesting and varied life. She retired from being a consultant psychiatrist in the National Health Service and an academic at the University of Manchester a number of years ago. She is now Emerita Professor of Primary Care Psychiatry at the University of Manchester. In the past, she has advised the World Health Organisation and was awarded the President’s Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2017.

To work at that high level you would expect someone who is driven and level headed, but she has suffered from anxiety and depression throughout her life. After she retired she decided to make her home in Orkney, her husband still had commitments down south so they would be enduring separate lives for the foreseeable future. She moves in slowly bringing items from their home in Yorkshire all the while wondering how this abode will cope with the relentless weather that sweeps in all year round. As they talk over Skype, John sees that she is relapsing into another period of mental illness.

It is a challenging time for both of them, John’s mother is admitted to a care home and he still wants to stay near her so they only have a certain amount of time together before he has to head back to Yorkshire. They have always wanted to live in Scotland, but circumstances mean that this isn’t possible at the moment and that isn’t helping with her anxiety. Slowly things begin to change though and a combination of medicines and hope help lift her from her blackest period.

This is a very personal memoir of a life spent helping others with their mental health issues whilst at the same time suffering from her own mental health issues. It did give her an insight into what the patients in her care were suffering from and almost certainly meant that she was in a better place to be able to help them recover. I had hoped for more of the place that she has chosen to live with her husband, Orkney. It is there in the book, but only as a landscape glimpsed occasionally in the narrative, but she does bring its bleak beauty alive in her prose.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

I have not yet been fortunate to see a Manx Shearwater, but they are a fascinating bird from all that I have read about them. They are moderately sized birds with a wingspan of around 80cm and weigh approximately 400g. They nest and breed on islands on the west coast of the UK that are free from rats. After breeding they abandon the chick in the burrow and make the 8000-mile journey to the South Atlantic just off Argentina.

Morgan -Grenville first came across them when he used to stay with his grandmother at her croft on the Island of Mull. While they were staying they were expected to help around the place in the mornings, pulling ragwort, hefting sacks of seaweed and equally hard but necessary jobs. That done the afternoon was time for adventure; climbing hills, swimming and having tea with some of her eccentric friends. One special treat was being taken out in a boat to see the puffins. It was on one of these trips that he noticed this bird just above the water and wasn’t quite sure what it was. The skipper of the boat told him it was a shearwater and his life was never quite the same again.

Thirteen years later and he is on his way to South Georgia for military duty. He has just stepped out from the bridge as he felt rather nauseous. He thought about the letter he has just received from his grandmother, he always saved it until last when he noticed a bird in the distance, his first albatross and a veteran bird too by the looks of it. He had the same feeling when he saw the shearwater and it set a question in his mind that he would spend the next thirty years answering: What happens with those ocean birds when they go out of sight?

This book is his story to seek the answers to that question and it will take him back to the places of his childhood, the tiny island of Lundy and all the way to South America. He helps with the research team on the Island of Skomer and sits waiting in a bar in Ireland waiting for a storm to pass.

I thought this was another step up from his previous book, Liquid Gold. This is part memoir, part travelogue and you can tell that this is a bird that he is obsessed with, from the story that he tells within the pages. The prose is rich and full of personal moments that do not detract from the book at all. Not quite a funny as his previous book, the narrative is a fitting tribute to these amazing birds and his fiercely independent grandmother.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Our wildlife in the UK is suffering more than ever before. The onslaught of modern life, intolerant landowners and farmers that are pushed to try and make a living mean that our wildlife has been pushed to the fringes like nothing before. Animals, such as the hedgehog that was once commonplace are now on the endangered list. There are eleven other mammals on the red list a full 25% of our native species.

Hearing things like this can make people feel helpless, but there are things that we can do to help out those that are most critical. In this book, Dominic Couzens has chosen thirty animals that are on this list and has written a little about them and specific issues that they are facing and most importantly has got lots of practical ideas and suggestions as to how we can help these creatures.

Starting with the hedgehog, a cute prickly mammal that most people are fond of, he details ways in which homeowners can help these little hogs. There are simple things like not using slug bait, leaving a small(ish) patch untidy and not digging up your lawn. Check piles of rubbish before disposing of and a new thing that is happening in my area, creating gaps to make a hedgehog highway.

The plants that you put in your garden can make a big difference, we all know about plants for pollinators, but adding in night-scented plants attracts moths, which in turn brings in those wonderful flying mammals, bats. There are other animals that you might not come across as you look out your kitchen windows like dolphins and hen harriers, but there are many suggestions on how you can help these too, including reducing plastic use and making sure it is properly disposed of, choosing fish in the supermarket that have been caught sustainably. Joining wildlife trusts and picking a particular society of an animal that you love is another way of helping. All monies in these societies are put towards helping in the best way possible.

I thought that this was a really nicely put together book. Couzens has lots of sensible ideas and practical things that you can do to help and you don’t often have to spend a lot of money either. The drawings by Sarah Edmonds add a really nice touch to this too. Buy it, read it and do something about it.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

At the moment scientists think that we are in the midst of the sixth extinction. The attrition rate of what used to be common species is just shocking and whilst we know some of the headline species that are at a critical level, such as Javan rhinoceros and Snow Leopards, there are bound to be a lot of other species that we have no idea about that are at a similar critical level.

As morbid as it sounds, Michael Blencowe has had a fascination with extinct creatures since childhood. That fascination has fully developed into an obsession, the result of which is this book. He travels around the world in search of the remnants of some of his favourite long-gone creatures with the hope of seeing or maybe even getting to touch some of these animals that are sadly no longer with us.

There are eleven animals in this book that he is looking for and he will head to San Francisco, Finland and New Zealand to search for the last traces of these magnificent animals. His first creature, though is more local, the Great Auk. These used to live in the UK and could be found on the various tiny islands scattered across the North Atlantic seaboard, but he was heading to Lundy to see where a vicar had been given an enormous egg by an islander. These huge birds were not able to fly, rather they were more like the penguins in the Southern Hemisphere and almost exclusively aquatic creature, By 1830 there was just one island left with these magnificent birds on and ironically their rarity made them more valuable. Soon they were all gone. And we had killed every last one.

There are still remains though, these are tucked away in museums where he heads to see the last example of this species. Another bird that suffered at the hands of greedy collectors was the Spectacled Cormorant. This was gone by 1852, and it was only after this that it was discovered that it had a much wider range than just the Bearing Sea. Not quite as beautiful is the Steller’s Sea Cow which is a dugong with skin as furrowed as oak bark and weighing ten tonnes. These huge animals were first spotted after the naturalist, Stellar has spotted them in the sea on the island they were shipwrecked on. It wouldn’t be long before they were no more too.

Even though it is a grim subject, I thought that Blencowe has written a really nice book. He is a lyrical writer and at times his prose is quite funny. This is a well-researched book. On top of that, he is passionate about his long-gone subjects, deftly mixing in his current travels with the historical context of how these animals disappeared. It is a warning shot across the bows too, a reminder that we are responsible for a lot of these extinctions at the moment and it will only get better if we change our habits and practices and see that the entire biosphere is interlinked and that our actions will have dramatic consequences. I thought that the artworks in the book by artist, Jade They are just beautiful. Definitely worth reading too.