A Garden Bird Year

(Hardback)

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Description

Britains gardens are a vast, living landscape and the home to hundreds of species of birds. Learn to pay attention to these visitors to your own garden or local park and youll have a front-row seat to the unfolding drama that is the garden birds year.
As dawn breaks across your back garden, if you were paying attention, you would notice that the robin and the blackbird are always the first birds to arrive. These ground hunters have large eyes, so dont mind the dim light of the early morning. And thats just the beginning of what you can learn watching your own back garden. Ornithologist Mike Toms has spent a year avidly observing his own garden, and the result is a comprehensive picture of the lives of garden birds.
From the crowded yet quiet January garden populated by migratory fieldfares and bramblings, to the riotous gardens of spring, filled with songbirds competing for mates, the garden ecosystem changes throughout the year. Learn to spot these changes, to greet the arrival of the swifts in May and the new crop of fledgling goldfinches and blackbirds in June, and youll find a new world opening up to you.
A Garden Birds Year is the perfect introduction to this world. Supremely readable, it explains biology and behaviour to paint a picture of the lives of common bird species, while also offering practical information for watching and feeding the birds in your own backyard. Toms details birds preferences for particular plants, seeds and feeders, so you can learn to attract different species to your own garden. He also charts fascinating recent adaptations urban birds sleep later than their rural counterparts, probably because cities are on average a few degrees warmer, and they sing either earlier or later, to avoid competing with local traffic; and the balance of migratory birds to Britain is being affected by the worlds changing climate. Many species of garden birds are threatened, but there is much that each one of us can do to support them, to attract them, and to help them thrive through the year.

Reviews

Praise for New Naturalist Garden Birds:

Excellent Chris Packham

Praise for New Naturalist Owls by Mike Toms:

Seventy years in the making, this celebration of our native owls is a fine addition to a glory of British publishing the New Naturalist series The Sunday Times

Its an excellent read and should be on every owl enthusiasts bookshelf, not to mention those of collectors of this great series Birdwatching magazine

Fabulous [New Naturalist Owls] brings the natural world to a wide audience in simple unfussy but engaging prose The result is the best and most detailed published account of the British owl species ever produced One of the joys of the book is that Toms leaves no stone unturned to narrate the birds full biography Mark Cocker, Eastern Daily Press

Author Bio

Mike Toms is an ornithologist who has been with the British Trust for Ornithology since 1994. His starting role at the Trust was to organise the first robust and repeatable national survey of the UKs Barn Owl population. Since then he has helped to set up the national Barn Owl Monitoring Programme, examined the calling behaviour of Tawny Owls and carried out the Non-native Species Secretariats risk assessment for Eagle Owls. A strong advocate for citizen science and the effective communication of science to a broader audience, he is the author of a number of books, including The Migration Atlas, and a regular contributor to BBC Wildlife magazine. He is a keen amateur naturalist in the traditional sense and likes nothing better than being out in the field.