A sky full of starlings - Stephen Moss

Stephen Mosss This Birding Life, (ISBN 978 1 84513 180 7), which Aurum published in 2006 (and reissues in paperback simultaneous with this title) was not only a sales success with over 7000 copies sold, but was also universally acclaimed for one of the most irresistibly beautiful and colourful jackets to grace any book that year. This follow-up volume features another such jacket by the doyen of bird artists, Robert Gillmor (whose linocut illustrations also adorn all the Collins New Naturalist books). The new book retains everything that reviewers liked about This Birding Life
its easy, good-humoured style, its combination of a wide birding knowledge with the gift of making things interesting for the general reader
and applies it to a simple concept. Stephen Moss began on 1 January 2007 to chronicle each species of bird as he was seeing it for the first time last year, and continued to do so until 31 December. He writes about what he saw, where he saw it, who he was with, what it made him think and feel
the little story of each birdwatching episode, be it goldfinches on his garden feeder, seeing hen harriers nesting underneath a bridge in Glasgow, or the extraordinary rescue of a rare albatross on a Somerset beach. The result is both a unique chronicle of Britains natural history and a touching and funny piece of autobiography
a year of life measured out in birds. Stephen Moss is also the author of A Bird in the Bush (Aurum), Attracting Birds to Your Garden and Remarkable Birds. He lives in Somerset.