An imposing, life-size oil painting dominates the main meeting room at the RSPB’s base in the heart of England: ‘the man above the fireplace’ – always present, rarely mentioned. Curious about the person in the portrait, the author began a quest to rediscover William Henry Hudson (1841–1922). It became a mission of restoration: stitching back together the faded tapestry of Hudson’s life, re-colouring it in places and adding new threads from the testaments of his closest friends.This...

A gripping tale on the trail of a most mysterious and charismatic bird.The book traces Conor Jameson's travels in search of the Goshawk, a magnificent yet rarely seen (in Britain at least) raptor. Each episode of the narrative arises from personal experience, investigation, and the unearthing of information from research, exploration and conversations.The journey takes him from an encounter with a stuffed Goshawk in a glass case, through travels into suppos...

American scientist and author Rachel Carson is said to have sparked the modern day environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. She made vivid the prospect of life without birdsong. But has her warning been heeded?Fifty years on, Conor Mark Jameson reflects on the growth of environmentalism since Silent Spring was published. His revealing and engaging tale plots milestone events in conservation, popular culture and political history in the...

A gripping tale on the trail of a most mysterious and charismatic bird.The book traces Conor Jameson's travels in search of the Goshawk, a magnificent yet rarely seen (in Britain at least) raptor. Each episode of the narrative arises from personal experience, investigation, and the unearthing of information from research, exploration and conversations.The journey takes him from an encounter with a stuffed Goshawk in a glass case, through travels into suppos...

Conor Mark Jameson has spent most of his life exploring the natural environment and communicating his enthusiasm for it to family, friends and, more recently, readers of a range of newspapers and magazines. Shrewdunnit brings together the best of these dispatches, alongside unpublished essays, in a poetic and evocative journal that inspires and delights. Jameson’s prose is fresh and in places irreverent, with a hint of mischief and a dash of wit.From his back door to the p...

In FISHING SEASON, acclaimed author Philip Weigall deftly captures all that makes the wonderful sport of flyfishing a passion for so many. It is a reflective book, an engrossing read that captures the heart and soul of this pastime that is so full of challenges, victories, disappointments, frustrations but, most of all, quiet happiness. So join Philip as he takes you through a year in the life of a flyfisher and ponders such important questions as why an organised fly box is rarer than a 1...

This highly readable account of the author's year dedicated to fly-fishing in New Zealand, relates the highs and lows, the intricacies and finesse, of pursuing trout in wild places and pristine waters.

A Childhood Dream. A Lost Land. The Journey of a Lifetime.How do you become an explorer? It's a question every child has asked. And, Steve Backshall was no different. But after a rainy-day visit to an exhibition of artefacts from Papua New Guinea, it was a question that began to obsess the seven-year old Backshall.Due to this childhood interest, the vast, untamed wildness of Papua New Guinea was where Backshall forged his unlikely path. From crushing lows o...

Even as a very young child, Simon King was passionate about the natural world. Being savaged by a rabid cheetah, charged at by rhinos and elephants and defecated upon by a long list of birds and other animals may sound like hell to some. But these, along with countless other experiences alongside all things furry, scaly, slimy and feathery have provided him with an enormously rich bank of tales to relive and retell.With his professional life starting aged ten, acting in a television...

Sixty Years A Fisherman is the long awaited and updated new edition of much-loved angler John Wilson's memoirs, an icon of the angling world! John reveals the real life story behind the camera lens of a man who was once a cruiseship hairstylist and who later became one of the most recognised TV personalities to have come into the world of angling. Packed full of fishing anecdotes and stories of his travels around the world, Sixty Years A Fisherman is beautifully illustrated with John's own...

Its a fact of flyfishing that there is no prescriptive manual for ensuring success. It is an activity that defies simple evaluation, with enough variables to leave even the experts scratching their heads from time to time. For example, why is it that a trout will respond to a certain fly one day, but ignore it entirely in identical conditions on another day? Respected flyfishing author Philip Weigall attempts to answer this question and many more in this engaging book.

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, drea...