The rarest blend of white and gold

This unusual book is beautifully written, produced and illustrated, but its subject — the small Slender-billed curlew — is strangely absent. In his ‘introduction to a ghost’, Horatio Clare explains that, when he was commissioned to tell the story of the western world’s rarest bird, it did, at least officially, still exist. This grail of the birding world, which he has never seen, he describes as a beautiful creature, a species of curlew plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plump common curlew, with a thinner down-curving beak which makes it look as though it is chewing a stem of grass.

He tries to trace it in Sicily, Italy, the Peloponnese, the Balkans and Turkey. Clare is adventurous, and in his impressive book Down to the Sea in Ships he travelled on two container ships, depicting the hard lives of the sailors.