The Hill of Summer.

This is by a remarkable author who was very much an enigma. I first read the book not long after it appeared in the 1960s. His first book was on the peregrine falcon and I was so impressed with that that I bought his second and only other book. Now these books have been justly feted by nature writers, but in those days they were relatively unknown. The Peregrine is about just one bird through winter but The Hill of Summer contains many, from spring to autumn, and it’s Baker’s view of birdlife in the part of Essex where he lived.

He was unusual in that he didn’t drive, despite working for the AA, so he cycled and walked around, immersed in the landscape. He went out in all weathers and at all times – before dawn, late in the day and even at night – and he wrote in this incredibly lyrical way about wildlife and landscape. His descriptions of birds are searingly beautiful and also accurate, they just fly off the page. They appeal to someone like me who actually knows the birds.

The nightjar is just one of many that stands out. It’s a wonderfully mysterious bird: crepuscular, a bird of twilight, and lives on heath and open woodlands. It has intricately camouflaged plumage, with a pattern like dead leaves and bark and bracken, and it twists and floats through the air on long wings and tail. It makes this extraordinary song, which has been compared to a distant motorbike or an old-fashioned sewing machine, and rises and falls as it fills the air. Baker describes this moment when he stood on the edge of a woodland clearing and was entranced by these birds displaying and singing.

Shorelands Winter Diary.

Charles Tunnicliffe was very important for me personally. He was a farmer’s son from Cheshire who had a huge talent for art and went to the Royal College. He was one of our greatest wood engravers and he first of all got commissioned by pet food people, like Bob Martin’s dog foods, and did lots of farm animal drawings. His draftsmanship of anything to do with the country and domestic and farm animals as well as wildlife is unimpeachable. He broke out when he began doing engravings for Henry Williamson’s series of nature books, starting with Tarka the Otter. His list of work is extraordinary. It ranges from work like the pet food or agricultural ads or Brooke Bond tea cards to fine oil paintings at Royal Academy exhibitions. He illustrated many, many books.

I loved his work from childhood. I grew up in North Wales and he and his wife moved to Anglesey to a house called Shorelands, and I used to see him there and watch him paint from a respectful distance. He occasionally came on walks with us. This is a wonderful book of his paintings and sketches and also his observations of birds. He’s a concise and interesting writer – his notes amplify the artwork brilliantly. There is a parallel text – Shorelands Summer Diary – but the Winter Diary appeals because I love winter birds such as the waders and wildfowl that used to come to the estuary and lagoon just opposite where he lived.

Most of his books are out of print but the ones that made the biggest impression on me as a child were a quartet of Ladybird books for children called What To Look For In Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter and they have the most sublime tableaux of imagined life through the whole year. There will be a shepherd in a sheep pen feeding his sheep on swedes in winter, who is looking up into a grey stormy sky to see a great skein of wild whooper swans flying over, or a pair of magpies chattering to one another on the branch of a larch against a backdrop of distant Welsh mountains, just like the ones I could see from my bedroom window. As a child it was just magic – almost as good as being there. He’s very high up in my pantheon of ornithological art.

Birds Britannica.

I have a vested interest in this book because I did more than five years of research on it, which was some of the most interesting work I’ve ever done. The book was inspired by an earlier book, Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey. It’s about birds and every aspect of human reaction to birds. It’s not at all a book about how to identify birds, and although it does tell you something of bird biology, it’s primarily about our interactions with birds, from shooting and eating them, to celebrating them in various ways, including art and poetry.

Crucially, it has a core of contributions from members of the public and one of my jobs was reading and selecting from the sackfuls of mail and e-mails from all over the British Isles. These were interwoven into wonderfully erudite, witty and beautifully crafted accounts by one of our greatest nature writers, Mark Cocker, and illustrated with photographs taken or selected by a fine bird photographer, Chris Gomersall. The public contributions reflected a huge range of responses, from saying: ‘This is what this bird means to me’ or ‘This is what we used to call these birds’. As you can imagine, there was a vast array of responses to birds like cuckoos or magpies and various other birds that loom large in myth and folklore. There was one man who said that when you see a magpie you must hold on to your left collar with your right hand until you see a four-legged animal. If you are wearing a T-shirt you should hold the neck where the collar would be. There is so much superstition about birds. Birds being so visible, there is more superstition about birds than about other animals.

Which birds, apart from pheasants, do we still shoot and eat?

Well, the books talks about hunting and eating birds from medieval times, when they had swans stuffed with geese, pies stuffed with blackbirds and so on. The pie with four and 20 blackbirds has a basis in fact. Sparrows were an agricultural problem and they were netted in millions. We had some wonderful contributions on this subject – such as the memory from one contributor of an old Hertfordshire man who killed sparrows by blasting a whole row of them in one go, using a shotgun loaded with cartridges filled with sand, after the flock had flown up on to a washing line. I got many strange submissions about trapping and poaching birds. I had forgotten, for example, that moorhens are still legal game until I saw them hanging in the window of my Greek butcher down the road in London, although they are there no longer, since even the Cypriots who used to buy them aren’t keen to spend time plucking them as the feathers are difficult to remove.

I’m in Italy. They eat a lot of birds here.

I’m just about to review a wonderful book on the birds of Malta. More than half the book describes how the birds are killed in Malta – nowhere is worse in terms of devastating birdlife. Italy too. I was just in Tuscany and I was impressed by the fact that they seemed to have moved on a bit – there were lots of signs saying ‘No hunting’. Quail are hunted on passage between here and North Africa but they have long been protected in the UK, where few breed. In the areas in Southern Europe where they are more numerous they are widely hunted.