NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES

A beautiful glossy colour compendium for every family bookcase with gorgeous colour photographs, one or two per page of gardens, parks and trees, farmland, hedgerows and verges, woods and forests, heaths, downs, moors and mountains, rivers, lakes, ponds and marshes, sea and seashore and all the birds and animals and fish and plants and trees to look out for. Spot the difference between the common line and the common yew, the walnut and the Norway maple, the creeping buttercup and the daisy, the biting stone crop and the sun spurge; the song thrush and the mistle thrush, the tit family with their beautiful colourful plumage, the buff-tailed bumble bee and the honey bee, the garden black ant, ladybirds, butterflies and moths, earthworms and slow worms, poppies and cowslips, redwings and quails, snails and snakes, bats to badgers, buzzards and red deer, common cotton grass with its fluffy white clumps of wool to a gallery of fish like the pike, perch, barbel and chub, the mink and the water vole, rock samphire and rock sea rocket on the shoreline and the gannets and kittiwake, limpets and winkles. With an excellent text, the final double page colour photograph is of a seal kissing her pup. A treasure trove of facts, remarkable stories, intriguing folklore and beautiful photographs covering some 500 species and answering such questions as which weed is still used in hand cream and why spiders were fed to the sick in ancient times. 384 very large glossy pages, colour illus.