Formidable black talons…

I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising — but reading David Cobham’s Bowland Beth: The Story of an English Hen Harrier I felt it again strongly. Your nature writer now has a hungry market, keen and generous publishers and a shelf in the bookshop. But anyone younger than my parents — unless they are very fortunate — has seen only a fraction of the natural richness our islands once held. And despite the sales and acclaim and translation rights, none of them — of us — has even pushed the boundaries laid down by our predecessors in the last century, when British nature really was something to write home about. Think of ‘BB’ (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), Gerald Summers, T.H. White and Henry Williamson; and, later, Ian Niall (John Kincaid McNeillie) and J.A. Baker.

Yes, we now have Mark Cocker and Jim Perrin, and Helen Macdonald had a huge success with H is For Hawk (riding on T.H.