Books of the year: Wildlife

Published on Friday 4 December 2009 18:35

FOR all the budding ornithologists out there, it will be hard to beat the RSPB Handbook of Scottish Birds (Christopher Helm, £9.99) by Peter Holden and Stuart Housden as a stocking-filler this Christmas.

It's not intended as a field guide – filling that gap is Jonathan Elphick and John Woodward's RSPB Pocket Birds of Britain and Europe (Christopher Helm, 8.99), which I've enjoyed using this year – but it is meant to be used as a key for unlocking the secrets of the bird world. I can picture a time, maybe 30 years hence, when we hear naturalists explaining that their interest in birds was sparked by this very title. The distribution maps are particularly useful – as you would expect, since they cover just Scotland, there's much more detail than you'd find in a UK-wide guide.

If you're a more experienced birdwatcher and are looking for a book to stretch your ornithological interests then the third edition of Lee Evans's Ultimate Site Guide to Scarcer British Birds (BirdGuides, 24.99) is a good next step on your journey towards full twitcher status. While birders are content to trundle through their local patch, twitchers will drive, cycle or even fly up and down the country to see rare birds. Evans's guide fits snugly into the gap between the two extremes. In Scotland we often forget how lucky we are, but Evans reminds us just how many rare species we have on our doorstep. The text is clear and well laid-out but it would be useful to have more maps and perhaps some photographs of sites.

While Lee Evans's name may only be familiar to birdwatchers, one man who is now recognisable to millions of television viewers is Simon King. Whether in front of the camera explaining the mysteries of the natural world for Springwatch, or behind it as a skilled operator, King is one of the most engaging of natural history presenters and the prose in his autobiography, Wild Life (Hodder & Stoughton, 20), is every bit as addictive. From chasing fledgling great tits through the less salubrious parts of Bristol, to watching gannets on Bass Rock, King shares the ups and downs of life as a wildlife film-maker.

From the young pretender to the throne, to the old master, and a new volume from Sir David Attenborough. Life Stories (Collins, 20) features scripts from the first five months of the BBC Radio 4 series of the same name. On air, Attenborough delivered ten-minute talks designed to expand the mind of the listener; in print, his words are supplemented by selected new and old photographs. His stories include why he would like to be reincarnated as a sloth, why the duck-billed platypus has at least three different names and why the press gets the blame for reviving stories of dragons. Attenborough's tales draw on his extraordinary adventures pursuing animals around the world but, unlike his autobiography Life on Air (BBC Books, 20) – an updated version of which is also available this Christmas – it's much easier to dip in and out of.

While Life Stories is undoubtedly an excellent piece of bedtime reading, the book to accompany Attenborough's latest television outing, Life (BBC Books, 25), sits in the coffee-table category. The text by series producer Martha Holmes and executive editor Michael Gunton is clear and concise but it's the photographs – from African fruit-eating bats on the wing to Japanese macaques peeking over the side of their "hot tub" – that really steal the show, reminding the reader of the immense wonders of the world: and why it's so important to protect our natural heritage.

Two titles from last year have stayed with me through the course of the past 12 months: Roy Dennis's A Life of Ospreys (Whittles Publishing, 18.99) – part memoir, part fact-filled handbook – and a year in the life of TV producer Stephen Moss in A Sky Full of Starlings (Aurum, 12.99). If you haven't already read them, now's the time.