The author of this books lives in the north of England and is an ex-police officer and a gifted photographer. The photographs are superb and the production values of this book are very high. There are carefully-designed large pages, gorgeous images and although I lingered over each image I was eager to see the next one too!
There are six chapters, each with its star species: Polecat (that surprised me), Red Grouse (not so surprising), Black Grouse, Curlew (with supporting other waders), raptors (largely a mixture of Buzzards, Short-eared Owls and Hen Harriers) and Red Squirrel. Honestly, I could have managed with fewer Red Grouse images, brilliant though they are, because a Red Grouse in some heather looks much the same from any angle. There are no images of Red Grouse shooting, the bag at the end of a day’s shoooting or even a row of grouse butts. It’s a very attractive but slightly sanitised view of the place of this bird in the landscape. The rather few landscape images are wonderful too and I would have sacrificed a few species images for a few more landscapes. I’m fairly easily pleased by good images of gorgeous wildlife but this book has many ‘Wow!’ moments. And we are spared any photographs of sheep, even distant ones, as far as I could see.
In these 192 pages there are 150 images and 10,500 words which tells you the balance of words and pictures. There’s nothing wrong with the text but there is so much quality in the photographs that I for one skipped some text on first reading and returned to it later where I did learn something of conservation efforts in this area.
The words slightly tiptoe around the subject of raptor persecution but if a picture’s worth a thousand words then the 150 wildlife images here tell a powerful story. Actually, here a lack of pictures tells a thousand words as the author hasn’t got any high quality images of adult male Hen Harriers from his home patch and those used are from a visit to Orkney, where, we are told, ground predators are less numerous and heather plentiful but not told that grouse shooting is absent and so too are upland gamekeepers.
This is a gorgeous book. Many readers of this blog will enjoy it and it would make a perfect Christmas present for friends and relatives who live oop North.
The cover? There are many even more striking images in this book but this one will appeal to many readers and is neither a gamebird nor a predator of gamebirds so it is conspicuously neutral. I’d give it 8/10 as a cover although there are images inside this book for which 10/10 would seem perfectly fair to me.
Our Wild Pennines: conservation stories from the English uplands by John Birch is published by Stainmoor Wild Press.