Fauna Britannica: The Practical Guide to Wild & Domestic Creatures of Britain: The Practical Guide to Wild and Domestic Creatures of Britain Book

In Fauna Britannica, Duff Hart-Davis manages to pull off a very difficult task admirably well. As his subtitle indicates this is a Practical Guide to Wild & Domestic Creatures of Britain, which attempts to describe the island's animals or at least some of them. The total count of different kinds of creatures, great and small that inhabit these Isles is immense, but the vast majority are very small in size. As a famous biologist once said, God must have been inordinately fond of beetles. So, for any such book it is inevitably a matter of selection. Not unreasonably, the bigger animals come first and range from the badger through bats and whales to the Tamworth pig. There are birds aplenty and altogether these backboned animals take up three-quarters of the book, leaving the remaining quarter for fish, amphibians, reptiles and a small selection of invertebrate shellfish, insects and so on. One could quibble about omissions, for example no sea-urchins, but this is primarily a book about backboned animals. It would take another volume or two to do the rest justice. Almost all our beasts get a high quality photo plus an informative and interesting description with particularly interesting longer sections on domesticated animals and aspects of their history. This is fascinating stuff and lifts the book far beyond the average field-guide. Besides which it is far to big and heavy to cart about the countryside. Fauna Britannica is more your feet-up-in-front-of-a-good-fire kind of guide but nevertheless is also practical in the sense that it is a very useful reference for anyone interested in our sadly depleted wildlife. Hart-Davis includes an informed discussion of the thorny problem of accidentally or intentionally introduced or reintroduced animals; as he rightly says "even a creature as small and apparently harmless as an edible dormouse can become a nuisance in an alien environment". Duff Hart-Davis is a well known British writer and journalist on country matters and consequently he manages to make his Practical Guide eminently readable and enjoyable. There is a useful appendix, listing organisations concerned with animals, and an excellent index. Fauna Britannica will provide many a happy hour of browsing with the reassuring thought that some of our previous inhabitants such as wolves, lions and bears are no longer lurking around the corner in the shrubbery. --Douglas PalmerRead More