Book Reviews
Browse the archive of BTO Book Reviews, which originally appear in each issue of BTO News - the BTO membership magazine. Join BTO today to get BTO News, and new book reviews, first.

Britain's Habitats: a Field Guide to the Wildlife Habitats of Great Britain and Ireland
Author: Sophie Lake, Durwyn Liley, Robert Still & Andy Swash
Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9780691203591
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 416pp
Price: £25.00
To understand the distribution of our birds it very much helps if we know the preferred habitats of each species. For example, Knot winter on mudflats, Dartford Warblers live on lowland heaths and Dotterel nest on mountain tops. But habitats are messy things. We all have an idea of what we mean by a woodland, but how many types of woodland are there, and how do they differ? This book will help you get at the details, and details can prove to be important.
This authoritative guide... read more
Andy Musgrove

A Bird a Day
Author: Dominic Couzens
Publisher: Batsford, London
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781849945868
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 368pp
Price: £20.00
This is a beautifully illustrated and very enjoyable book by well-known author and naturalist Dominic Couzens. The title says it all - the book goes through a calendar year showcasing 366 (it accounts for a Leap Year) species of birds from all across the world representing a dazzling array of birds from a similar range of habitats.
Birds are featured at a relevant time of year - Snowy Owls are discussed in the depths of January, perhaps more familiar species like Great-crested Grebes... read more
Steve Willis

Farming with Nature: Promoting Biodiversity Across Europe Through Partridge Conservation
Author: Jen Brewin, Francis Buner & Julie Ewald
Publisher: Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Fordingbridge
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781901369380
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 99pp
Price: £12.00
This book sets out an approach for successfully combining a viable farming business with increasing biodiversity and other public goods. It draws on scientific research and demonstration projects from across Europe and outlines habitat measures designed to benefit the Grey Partridge.
The reason the Grey Partridge is the focus of this book is because it is an indicator species for a healthy farmed habitat. As such, there are several sections about other species that will benefit from... read more
Gillian Birtles

Raptor Prey Remains: A Guide to Identifying What’s Been Eaten by a Bird of Prey
Author: Ed Drewitt
Publisher: Pelagic Publishing, Exeter
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781784272074
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 256pp
Price: £24.99
Upon receiving this book, I showed it to my non-birding partner, who saw the front cover and described it as “traumatic”. This is not a book for the squeamish, as the graphic front cover featuring the final moments of a Starling’s life makes abundantly clear. Rather, this is a book that may appeal to raptor workers or other ecologists as a reference tool in the exciting whodunnit mysteries that prey remains present to those of us with a fascination for such things.
Much of this book... read more
Anthony Wetherhill

Hats: a Very UNnatural History
Author: Malcolm Smith
Publisher: Michigan State University Press, Michigan
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781611863475
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 171pp
Price: £39.99
The vivid plumage used on the hat on the cover of this book is a reminder of the main reason birds are featured in a book on hats. Covering the history of hats from their earliest evidence at the end of the Stone Age through the peak of the fur and feather trade to modern hat styles, this book cleverly introduces us to the consequences of extravagant tastes in materials and fashions. I picked up this book intrigued as to what facts I might glean from its pages and found myself both... read more
Katharine Bowgen

Birds: An Anthology
Author: Jaqueline Mitchell
Publisher: Bodleian Library Publishing, Oxford
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781851245291
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 272pp
Price: £16.99
Judging the selection of material for an anthology is pointless - each is as individual as a Nightingale's song, shaped by the taste and experience of the compiler. However, any anthology should aspire to serendipity and digestibility, to inform and inspire, and be attractive enough to make you want to dip in. The material selected for this book draws on the Bodleian's extensive archives and ranges from Ovid to Helen Macdonald and Simon Barnes, though most comes from the 16th to early 20th... read more
Rob Robinson

The Ring Ouzel: a View from the North York Moors
Author: Vic Fairbrother & Ken Hutchinson; Jonathan Pomroy(Illustrator), Chris Rollie (Fwd)
Publisher: Whittles Publishing, Dunbeath
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781849954587
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 288pp
Price: £21.95
In my career as a field ornithologist, I would rate one of the best projects I ever worked on as the season I spent assisting on the long-running Ring Ouzel (Turdus torquatus) monitoring project at Glen Clunie in Aberdeenshire. That project initiated my passion for the mountain blackbird and having the opportunity to spend hours among the heather and crags peering into the intricacies of Ring Ouzel life taught me so much about interpreting the behaviour of individual birds. From... read more
Anthony Wetherhill

Woodland Flowers: Colourful Past, Uncertain Future
Author: Keith Kirby
Publisher: Bloomsbury, London
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781472949073
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 400pp
Price: £35.00
This is a book for anyone curious about the lives of our woodland plants, and the processes and pressures that affect them. Keith Kirby’s career as a woodland ecologist gave him vast experience of woods and their conservation throughout Britain. This is the eighth title in the British Wildlife Collection series that already has a reputation for finely produced, informative, readable books. Keith Kirby’s book is a thought provoking, personal and richly illustrated contribution to it.
... read more
Rob Fuller

The Biology of Moult in Birds
Author: Lukas Jenni & Raffael Winkler
Publisher: Helm, London
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781472977229
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 320pp
Price: £55.00
Moult is a fascinating basic life history event in birds which, despite its major impact on their life cycle, is relatively poorly understood and even neglected. This is a companion to the excellent Moult and Ageing of European Passerines (secodnd edition, 2020) by the same authors, previously reviewed in BTO News 335. It started life as a revision of the short summary in the introductory chapters of the Moult and Ageing of European Passerines (first edition, 1994... read more
Hugh Hanmer

Uplands and Birds
Author: Ian Newton
Publisher: William Collins, London
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9780008298524
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 606pp
Price: £35.00
Once again, Ian Newton has produced another brilliant book. As always, it is packed with facts and ideas presented in a clear and easy style that both grips one’s interest and deepens one’s understanding.
The uplands are often thought of as more natural or unspoilt than the lowland landscapes of Britain, their state determined largely by their topography, geology and climate. But Newton shows how today’s upland landscapes have been created by human activities over thousands of years... read more
Jeremy Greenwood

Pembrokeshire
Author: Jonathan Mullard
Publisher: William Collins, London
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9780008112820
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 528pp
Price: £35.00
Like the author, I too spent many a childhood holiday in Pembrokeshire. In those days the five hour drive from the mountains of Snowdonia to the Mediterranean-like coast of Pembrokeshire was well worth it, especially the boat trips to Caldey to see my first Grey Seals. Now in later life I visit Pembrokeshire again mainly to the coast and Islands for the bird life - little realising what other treasures the county has to offer. I am fortunate in having a number of friends in the area who... read more
Kelvin Jones

The Kestrel: Ecology, Behaviour and Conservation of an Open-land Predator
Author: David Costantini & Giacomo Dell'Omo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781108470629
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 224pp
Price: £49.99
The Kestrel is probably not a book for those with a passing interest in kestrels, but would be a useful addition to the library of anyone who has a keen research interest in this widespread but declining falcon. The book, published by Cambridge University Press, looks at some of the not-inconsiderable volume of research that has been published on kestrels over the past 30 years in particular, since the publication of the Poyser monograph of the same title by Andrew Village in 1990.... read more
Peadar O’Connell

Provence and Camargue – France
Author: Dirk Hilbers, Constant Swinkels & Albert Vliegenthart
Publisher: Crossbill Guides Foundation, Arnhem
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9789491648168
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 256pp
Price: £26.95
Global circumstance has made international travel too tricky to contemplate in 2020. So could a Crossbill Guide – guidebooks for the discerning naturalist to some of Europe’s most exciting regions – be a good read in such a year? Thankfully, yes. Within a few pages, I was yearning to return to Provence and the Camargue, a region I’ve only once explored. But I happily spent the rest of the book doing some armchair travel, thanks to the usual holistic mixture of well researched descriptions of... read more
Teresa Frost

Avifaunas, Atlases & Authors: a Personal View of Local Ornithology in the United Kingdom, from the Earliest Times to 2019
Author: David Ballance
Publisher: Calluna Books, Wareham
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9780993347757
Binding: Softback
Page Count: 346pp
Price: £25.00
As the title of this book suggests, it is a meta-book; a book about other books. Its main purpose is to inform the reader about works that deal, in various ways, with the element of place in ornithology. These can largely be separated into books describing where different birds occur within a country or region (atlases), and those describing the occurrence and status of birds in one or more localities (avifaunas). It is a follow-up to a previous book (and three large supplements expanding on... read more
Mark Wilson

Acoustic Ecology of European Bats: Species Identification, Study of their Habitats and Foraging Behaviour
Author: Michel Barataud (author), Yves Tupinier, Herman J.G.A. Limpens (contributors), Anya Cockle-Betian (translator)
Publisher: BIOTOPE, Paris
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9782366622447
Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 352pp
Price: €49.00
With developments in bat detectors, particularly passive detectors which are left outside to automatically trigger and record any bats that fly past, there is the potential to provide representative acoustic monitoring of bat species distribution and activity as a measure of relative abundance. Whilst software for semi-automating the analysis of sound files is available and can save considerable time in helping to assign recordings to species as a first analyses, acoustic identification... read more
Stuart Newson
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