John McEwen

Toowit-towoo! At long last, a Collins book on owls

Mike Toms's Owls may lack a jolly anecdote or two, but mainly it's a hoot

A snowy owl in Ottawa. From A Picture Book of Snowy Owls (ebook) by Bryan Shane and Patricia Lafferty (For details, see bryanshane.com)

Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it is puzzling that it has taken Collins 70 years to add this ‘Natural History of the British and Irish Species’ to its famous New Naturalist Series.

It is of course primarily a zoological work, with statistics, charts and sentences such as: ‘A real breakthrough in resolving this problem has been the advent of affordable molecular and biochemical methods.’

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in