John Lister-Kaye tracks Highland wildlife through a pair of binoculars as he lies in his bath

Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a single 12-month cycle in the life of the Scottish Highlands near his home at the Aigas Field Centre, just to the west of Inverness. The author has lived in the region since the 1960s, when he was lured north out of a business career to take up work with the famous naturalist Gavin Maxwell.

In the intervening half-century he has acquired a deep knowledge of wildlife, and many of his observations are skilfully woven into the fabric of his 12-month narrative, so that we end up with a lifetime’s rich experience for the price of one year’s diary. For all his ability to capture the specialities of the region — the pine martens raiding his hen house or acquiring essential vitamins through their curious treetop harvest of rowan berries, or ravens nesting in Arctic blizzards, or the whooper swans and the wild winter geese migrating south from Iceland — it is his intimacy with what might be called his more mundane neighbours that I found most compelling.

A tour de force of forensic observation and imaginative reconstruction is a passage in which he follows the musky prints left by a hunting fox one snow-covered morning. The maker of those tracks has long gone to earth, but Lister-Kaye, drawing on an entire career of other fox sightings and fox thoughts, re-imagines the living creature, its movements, its pauses and its hunting strategies, from the marks left behind. By the end he makes the reader feel as if they witnessed the whole moonlit drama themselves.

Another ploy of the author is to start with some casual observation and use it as an unlikely scaffold on which to build a political or philosophical essay.