Following his overview of guides to botanical identification last year, the author now turns his attention to the history of those most popular of natural history books, the bird guides.
Last autumn, I was at a preview of an art auction in Salisbury and came across a watercolour that resonated across the decades. It was of a pair of Wallcreepers painted by the Dutch artist Johannes Gerardus Keulemans. I didn’t bid for it, but wondered how it had ended up among this ragtag collection of paintings.