What’s eating London’s songbirds?

This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity, because it is a thorough and entertaining history; the first to cover the entire London area within a 20-mile radius of St Paul’s, from the earliest record, in Roman times, to the present.

A chronology lists the date when the 369 species were first recorded, from the red kite in the 2nd century AD to Bonaparte’s gull and the buff-bellied pipit in 2012. The last named illustrate the recent rise in esoteric sightings following the postwar birth of the bearded-birder brigade, with their competitive box-ticking and ever more hi-tech equipment. There are many surprises. Who would have thought the Canada goose, first imported by Charles II, would precede the house sparrow, or the Egyptian goose (1863) the mallard (1866)? And then there are the bizarre sightings: the flock of starlings which stopped a face of Big Ben’s clock, 12 August 1949; the water-rail on a window-sill of the Guildhall, 3 April 1967; the puffin in Sloane Square, September 1984.