For his Sunday Book review this week, Mark has chosen the new fully updated edition of the Lincolnshire Bird Club‘s Birds of Lincolnshire. (I’m trying to imagine what it would be like if the county of my own residence here in Oregon – Columbia – had a bird club that was capable of producing it’s own reference guide to the local bird species. For that matter, I’m trying to imagine if it had a bird club at all. That’s one of the most notable, and to me heartbreaking, differences between being a naturalist in the US and the UK: the abundance of local groups in the UK versus the astonishing paucity of them in the US. Alas…)
But back to the matter at hand. I’ve long been an enthusiastic advocate of obtaining field guides and other reference materials with as local a scope as can be obtained. Thus, even though it will not be of particular immediate use to me, I was delighted to discover yet another county-level ornithological reference book that, as Mark writes, “[i]f you live in Lincolnshire you will want to own this book and it will be an invaluable reference source for your everyday birding for years to come.” I was also absolutely chuffed to learn that this is not a first for this club; that the book is an update of a previous edition published in 1989. It does my old heart good to see such efforts are continuing in our thoroughly mad, mad world.
Oh, and lest you take the idea from the book’s cover art that Lincolnshire hosts a thriving population of Pallas’ Sandgrouse… well, Mark explains this choice of much better than I can.
Links to Mark Avery’s Sunday book reviews appear in The Well-read Naturalist by special arrangement. You can find all of Mark’s past reviews as well as a wide-ranging collection of his other writings on his Standing Up for Nature website. Mark’s opinions regarding the books he reviews are his own.
