What better way to learn about a subject than by question and answer? Turtle experts Gibbons and Greene are familiar with the questions everyone asks, and they launch the subject with the most basic one of all: what are turtles? The answer is that they are one of the most recognisable groups of animals on earth, with their shell, protruding legs and toothless jaws. They need to be distinguished from tortoises and terrapins, though turtle is the generic name for all the species, which is at least 200 million years old. Most turtle experts agree that the world has more than 300 living species of turtles, divided into 12 taxonomic families. Turtles are important players in the food web, and can serve as sentinels of environmental quality. They are cold-blooded, but they often choose to bask in warm places and can raise their body temperature with a resulting increase in metabolism. When they sleep they close their eyes. Some turtles vocalise, and males may fight for a female. Turtles do not reduce fish populations, contrary to the complaints of some fishermen, but they do kill and eat ducks. Turtles are likely to be affected by global warming and are easily poisoned by pollution, which is one of the reasons it is inadvisable to eat them. Turtles have a habit of wandering into the road in America and get hit by cars, while females often nest by the roadside. Turtles have an important role in mythology, particularly Native North American tribes, while Chinese and Hindu stories represent the world as laid out on the back of a turtle. 163pp, paperback, black and white and colour photos, species lists.

From foxes and ravens attacking new-born lambs to weasels eating game-bird chicks, predators compete with us, putting them directly into the firing line. Buzzards, crows, badgers, seals, kites - Britain and Ireland's predators are impressive and diverse, and they capture our collective imagination, but some people may even consider them our enemies. Farming, fishing, sport and leisure industries want to see numbers of predators reduced, and conservation organisations also worry that predators are threatening some endangered species. So what do we do? Mary Colwell travels across the UK and Ireland to encounter the predators face to face and watches their lives in the wild and discovers how they fit into the landscape. She talks to the scientists studying them and the wildlife lovers who want to protect them and also meets the people who want to control them to protect their livelihoods or sporting interests. Hers is a thoughtful and reasoned analysis of the debates surrounding the human story of living with predators, already soaked in blood and passion. She touches on religion and the philosophy of predation, children's literature, Christianity and the necessity of killing to eat which has become a sign of humanity's sinfulness. 312pp, rather lovely illustrations.

In the middle of the pandemic, one family moved from their comfortable modern house on a smart estate in Oldham, Manchester to a centuries-old farmhouse, surrounded by nothing but fields as far as the eye could see. So how did they end up on this 120 acre working farm in the Peak District? Kelvin Fletcher is a much-loved British actor who lifted the coveted trophy on Strictly Come Dancing in 2019 and his childhood sweetheart, now wife, Liz is a Voice Over artist and actor. With their two children they have appeared in BBC One's Kelvin?s Big Farming Adventure. Here in their own words is their remarkable story. In pyjamas and wellies, they chase pigs back into the pen and through the mayhem of kids and muddy troughs they begin a new life in the countryside. After just eight months, they had 40 sheep, three pigs and three alpacas waiting for their breakfast, and by the end of this book, a new baby was to make three kiddes, or would that be four with twins? And not forgetting Ginger the dog. 325 pages, colour photos.

"A recently born seal pup. It's mother, resting a few meters away, is ignoring it, pebble and kelp surrounds also smeared with blood. Another few meters further on, a mob of grey black-backed gulls attacks the afterbirth, pulling it out of its steak-like shape into a stringier form, gorging torn off scarlet strands, then tug-of-warring with the remains. The pup appears to make an attempt towards its mother, but only manages to flop on to its side, exposing a pink inch of umbilical cord worming from its belly fur... Once familiar with its smell and henceforth assured of recognising it, she strokes its head with her clawed front flipper. Willing her on, I watch her finally assume a feeding position..." There are fewer grey seals in the world that endangered African elephants, and the British Isles host almost half of this global population. Every year, these charismatic animals with their expressive eyes, and whiskers more sensitive than our fingertips, haul out on our shores to breed and raise their pups. Susan Richardson has always been entranced by seals. They comforted her as an anxious child and brought joy when she began to spread her wings as a writer and helped her find her way after the loss of her mother. Now she sets out to trace the rhythm of their lives, travelling the coast clockwise from Cornwall to Norfolk, in line with the autumn pupping season. She explores the myths surrounding seals, from the shape-shifting selkie skins to the claims that they decimate fish populations, and she discovered that the greatest dangers they face come from humankind. Her book is a lyrical tale of memory, rescue and rehabilitation, and the recurring theme is the human-seal connection. She sees the life of the sea as a mirror of ourselves and vice versa. 376 pages.

Billed as "The most user-friendly guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland", this soft-backed chunky volume would just about fit in a capacious pocket, certainly a rucksack, and covers over 300 different common species. The Unique Selling Point of the volume is the illustrations. Each bird is presented in close-up photography from a number of different angles, sometimes as many as ten, against a typical background, but instead of the usual long-range shot without much detail, the close-up photos are presented in montage, so a far greater degree of clarity and accuracy is achieved. The first 12 pages consist of thumbnail quick identifiers of all the birds, categorised as swimming, flying or walking waterbirds, followed by upland gamebirds, raptors, miscellaneous larger landbirds, and songbirds. The main text for each bird includes the bird's length next to the name of the species, given with the English and scientific names. On each plate, plumage, age and sex are labelled, and the text describes population, behaviour, flight, identification points, and general quirks and peculiarities. The song is described, though this is a challenge: the whimbrel has "a 7-note tittering call pupupu" while a waxwing has "a distinctive, trilled sree, sibilant like a pea-whistle". Described as a "birders' favourite", the waxwing can eat up to a thousand berries a day and is often found in car parks, immune to human activity. Apart from the birds themselves, the photos of habitat are also gorgeous. 302pp, softback, colour photos.
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This appealing journey through the British countryside takes us from place to place and back in time, starting with prehistoric Shetland where the red-necked phalarope has made a comeback and ending with the habitat creation project on the Avalon Marshes in Somerset. The author is fascinated by the way wildlife has taken advantage of human habitation and transformed it for its own needs. Since WWII pollution, intensive farming and the global climate emergency have contributed to a loss of habitats for adders, stoats, lizards, orchids, bush crickets, peregrine falcons and great crested grebes, to name a few. However, these endangered species have found unexpected havens in abandoned transport networks, places of worship and industrial sites. The author visits the Shetland iron age settlement on the island of Mousa, where the broch, a round lookout post, is as solid now as when it was built. Since then there have been four conquests of the British Isles, the Romans, Saxons Vikings and Normans, each one bringing its distinctive technology. Rare lichens now spread themselves on Hadrian's Wall, wheatears and ring ouzels return from Africa and perch on granite boulders, while the Emperor Moth is again an upland speciality. Following the Industrial Revolution, visiting the countryside became a specialised activity, with walking and rambling set apart from everyday life, but there are signs that we are once again embracing nature. Our railway network of 10,000 miles was more than twice that at beginning of the 20th century, and old railway lines are now becoming wildlife corridors, with some of the most popular to be found in urban settings such as Finsbury Park to Highgate and Bristol to Bath. 260pp paperback.

A fun and scientifically deep stroll through history, anatomy and evolution. From an evolutionary point of view, we humans are novices to walking on two legs. Swapping from all fours to bipedalism brought with it a host of problems. We could no longer outrun most predators or most prey. Bad backs, hips and knees and hernias became much more common as a result of the pressure of gravity and narrow hips, which make upright walking more efficient, also make childbirth hazardous for both baby and mother. Bipedalism can be viewed as a grand evolutionary experiment, one which has been going on, with varying degrees of success, for some seven million years. In the last 4.5 million years a number of different but related hominins have walked the Earth and Homo sapiens is just one of them - or so Jeremy DeSilva thought. Then, in the early 2000s he was part of a team that discovered and described two newly discovered hominins in Chad, that were some 7 million years old and showed that they too walked on two legs - so it was time for a radical rethink! Here he goes right back into the fossil record, leading us on a sweeping tour, explaining what we currently know about our earliest ancestors, how they walked and how they lived. Bipedalism freed our arms for tool use and other highly dextrous activities, it freed pectoral muscles and lungs for speech and the fact that it made us more vulnerable to predators caused us to live cooperatively in organised communities, sharing knowledge and skills. 334pp.

'A beautiful, lyrical story of personal healing that deftly interweaves botanical history and lore, and highlights the importance of urban green spaces in an increasingly disconnected world.' - Kayte Nunn. Interweaving gardening history with memoir, here is nature writing and knowledge of horticulture to inspire readers to get planting and how plants have the power to help us find ourselves. When she suddenly finds herself uprooted, heartbroken, grieving and living out of a suitcase in her late 20s, Alice Vincent begins planting seeds. She nurtures pot plants and vines on windowsills and draining boards, filling her many temporary London homes with greenery. The benefits of sticking your hands in soil and where horticulture fits with the modern urban experience is blended in one enjoyable cocktail of memoir and botanical history. As the months pass and with each unfurling petal and budding leaf, Alice begins to come back to life. The book is a poem to wild hope, strength and tenderness in nature and in ourselves. 350pp, paperback.

'A Fish, the Earth, and the History of a Common Fate' is the sub-title of this celebration of the majestic and mysterious salmon. Over the centuries a vital resource, a dietary staple and an irresistible catch, there is so much more to this extraordinary fish as Mark Kurlansky reveals. If we can save salmon, we can save the world. Salmon persist as a barometer for the health of our planet. Atlantic salmon is always 100% farm raised. Only Pacific types are wild caught if you have ever wondered when looking at a restaurant menu. In a tale of two fisheries and more, chapters cover Old Ways and a New Land, A Golden Fish Arrives in the East, The White Man Comes, The Elegy for the Atlantic, The Ballad of the Pacific and The Golden Fish Departs. We meet Ole Olson and his young Montana fishing crew in Alaska and ships in the bay that buy the catch and put it on ice. We are taken to locations like the rivers of Bristol Bay and the Copper River winding 300 miles through rapids, rugged turns and falls where the salmon come in to spawn and there are fine specimens there and in the Prince William Sound and other great American salmon rivers like the Columbia, the Snake, the Sacramento and the Connecticut. The pollution of the industrial revolution choke salmon and now salmon are threatened by climate change with the decline in fish proportionate to the rise in temperature being verifiable. And hatcheries should stop diminishing with genetic diversity of the stocks. Full of the writer's characteristic curiosity and insight it is a magisterial history of a wondrous creature. 324pp, colour and other photos.

One of our nation's most accomplished nature writers, Patrick Barkham has been the natural history correspondent for The Guardian for over 20 years. In this book he has selected some 50 of what he considers his most compelling articles which paint a picture of contemporary wildlife. From peregrine falcons nesting in the Thames to Britain's last lion tamer, we meet people who have run away from it all to isolate themselves on remote islands and equally lonely animals, such as the last British greater mouse-eared bat, which has been living in a damp disused railway tunnel in Sussex for decades. Discover the riddle of the Orkney vole, the Beasts of Bushy and Dartmoor, egg snatchers, on safari in the Essex rainforest, the subtle magic of a Norfolk Broad, the hen harrier murderer, lost orcas, beavers, big cats, and the sea eagle and Sheffield's war on trees and the rewilding of newts. There is an excellent extended interview with Sir David Attenborough and go on an eye-opening ramble along the entire length of the HS2 train route and its implications for man and nature. 420pp.