4 out of 5 stars
A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.
In the first lockdown this year, people started to become more aware of the wild world around them, helped by the drop in traffic, wildlife that you may not have seen or heard before would suddenly become more visible. Some of the easiest wildlife to see is birds and this book is aimed at those who have discovered that watching them can be endlessly fascinating.
In this new book out, Dominic Couzens has picked a bird for every day of the year. Some of them are obviously linked to that day in particular, so there is naturally a robin in December and birds that are more common in the summer appear in those months in the book. Quite how you only pick 366 birds from the 10,000 or so species that we still have is quite something, but Couzens has managed to get the familiar, the exotic the rare and the unusual in a really nice mix.
The first thing that I did when receiving this was to look up the bird that is on my birthday. That bird wasn’t one that I had ever heard of but it was fairly unique in one of its habits.
It is a beautifully produced book, it is printed on quality paper and feels heavy. The stunning photographs and artworks accompany all of the chosen birds, along with a small piece of text with facts and anecdotes about their behaviour or habitat or unique trait.
That sounds like a lovely gift book. Go on: what was your birthday bird? We have a bird calendar at the moment and it’s very heavy on the tanagers!
It was a Pallas’s Sandgrouse. Never heard of it before!