To say I was excited to see a copy of Neha Sinha’s recently published “Wild and Wilful, Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species” arrive on my desk from HarperCollins India would be an understatement. I have followed Ms. Sinha’s social media postings about India’s natural history for some time and I have learned a remarkable amount from her about both India’s wildlife and the conservation efforts undertaken on the behalf of it.
In a little known early draft of “Much Ado About Nothing,” Shakespeare depicted Beatrice as an avid amateur lepidopterist with a particular interest in moths. Consequently, she would have well known “of old” the intricately camouflaged Jade Hawkmoth (Daphnis hypothous) which can quickly disappear to the observer the moment it lands upon a patch of foliage.
While the National Audubon Society has a long and justly respected name in the world of natural history books, the history of these books themselves has been a bit – shall we say – “up and down.” Those sufficiently long in the tooth (such as myself) may well remember the well-crafted volumes by such authoritative authors as Richard Pough, with their well-wrought and thorough yet never prolix text, finely detailed black & white illustrations, and in later editions even central color plate sections. Then of course, there was that later series…
Having recently read that a new volume of the New Naturalist Library was soon to be available, I had an intuition that Mark Avery already had a copy of it and would soon be publishing one of his Sunday Book Reviews about it. So paying a visit to his blog today I was not on the least surprised to discover that the subject of his most recent review is, of course, David Wilkinson’s “Ecology and Natural History,” New Naturalist Library volume 143.