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A Garden Bird Year
- Author
- Mike Toms
- Narrator
- Neville Watchurst
- Publisher
- HarperCollins Publishers
- Publish Date
- 8 July 2021
- Run Time
- 8 hours 18 minutes
- Format
- x-book®
What to expect
Britain’s gardens are a vast, living landscape and the home to hundreds of species of birds. Learn to pay attention to these visitors to your own garden or local park and you’ll have a front-row seat to the unfolding drama that is the garden bird’s year.
As dawn breaks across your back garden, if you were paying attention, you would notice that the robin and the blackbird are always the first birds to arrive. These ground hunters have large eyes, so don’t mind the dim light of the early morning. And that’s just the beginning of what you can learn watching your own back garden. Ornithologist Mike Toms has spent a year avidly observing his own garden, and the result is a comprehensive picture of the lives of garden birds.
From the crowded yet quiet January garden populated by migratory fieldfares and bramblings, to the riotous gardens of spring, filled with songbirds competing for mates, the garden ecosystem changes throughout the year. Learn to spot these changes, to greet the arrival of the swifts in May and the new crop of fledgling goldfinches and blackbirds in June, and you’ll find a new world opening up to you.
A Garden Bird’s Year is the perfect introduction to this world. Supremely readable, it explains biology and behaviour to paint a picture of the lives of common bird species, while also offering practical information for watching and feeding the birds in your own backyard. Toms details birds’ preferences for particular plants, seeds and feeders, so you can learn to attract different species to your own garden. He also charts fascinating recent adaptations – urban birds sleep later than their rural counterparts, probably because cities are on average a few degrees warmer, and they sing either earlier or later, to avoid competing with local traffic; and the balance of migratory birds to Britain is being affected by the world’s changing climate. Many species of garden birds are threatened, but there is much that each one of us can do to support them, to attract them, and to help them thrive through the year.
Critics Review
-
Praise for New Naturalist Garden Birds:
‘Excellent’ Chris Packham
Praise for New Naturalist Owls by Mike Toms:
‘Seventy years in the making, this celebration of our native owls is a fine addition to a glory of British publishing – the New Naturalist series’ The Sunday Times
‘It’s an excellent read and should be on every owl enthusiast’s bookshelf, not to mention those of collectors of this great series’ Birdwatching magazine
‘Fabulous … [New Naturalist Owls] brings the natural world to a wide audience in simple unfussy but engaging prose … The result is the best and most detailed published account of the British owl species ever produced … One of the joys of the book is that Toms leaves no stone unturned to narrate the birds’ full biography’ Mark Cocker, Eastern Daily Press
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Mike Toms
- Narrator
- Neville Watchurst
- Duration
- 8 hours 18 minutes
- Release Date
- 8 July 2021
- ISBN
- 9780008470630
- Format
- x-book®
- Publisher
- HarperCollins Publishers
- Genre
- Wildlife: birds and birdwatching: general interest, Zoology: birds (ornithology), Birds, including cage birds, as pets, Nature and the natural world: general interest, Natural and wild gardening
Synopsis
Britain’s gardens are a vast, living landscape and the home to hundreds of species of birds. Learn to pay attention to these visitors to your own garden or local park and you’ll have a front-row seat to the unfolding drama that is the garden bird’s year. As dawn breaks across your back garden, if you were paying attention, you would notice that the robin and the blackbird are always the first birds to arrive. These ground hunters have large eyes, so don’t mind the dim light of the early morning. And that’s just the beginning of what you can learn watching your own back garden. Ornithologist Mike Toms has spent a year avidly observing his own garden, and the result is a comprehensive picture of the lives of garden birds.From the crowded yet quiet January garden populated by migratory fieldfares and bramblings, to the riotous gardens of spring, filled with songbirds competing for mates, the garden ecosystem changes throughout the year. Learn to spot these changes, to greet the arrival of the swifts in May and the new crop of fledgling goldfinches and blackbirds in June, and you’ll find a new world opening up to you.A Garden Bird’s Year is the perfect introduction to this world. Supremely readable, it explains biology and behaviour to paint a picture of the lives of common bird species, while also offering practical information for watching and feeding the birds in your own backyard. Toms details birds’ preferences for particular plants, seeds and feeders, so you can learn to attract different species to your own garden. He also charts fascinating recent adaptations – urban birds sleep later than their rural counterparts, probably because cities are on average a few degrees warmer, and they sing either earlier or later, to avoid competing with local traffic; and the balance of migratory birds to Britain is being affected by the world’s changing climate. Many species of garden birds are threatened, but there is much that each one of us can do to support them, to attract them, and to help them thrive through the year.
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