Tim Dee

With their slightly naff arcades and a stiff enough wind to blow sand in your ice cream, there is some unique and nostalgic about the British seaside. The cry of the herring gull is one of the distinct sounds that make the trip to the coast; for some, it is a special sound, others, however, detest these bold avians. However, their reputation is not great though, they are known as bin chickens and frequently called something ruder especially after they have just purloined your chips. In this modern world, there are a lot of creatures suffering at the hand of man, but some survive and others thrive. Gulls are one of those that are making the most of the way we are now using our landscape.

Where gulls win though is our wastefulness these days, we throw so much rubbish away as well as littering the cities and countryside that they have become intertwined and dependent on us. As we are not allowed to incinerate rubbish these days, the items that we cannot recycle have to go into landfill. On every waste site around the country, you will see gulls in their hundreds, sifting through the plastic searching for titbits to eat. The generic, and incorrect term, seagull covers all of these large white birds. But if you take time to stop and look at them you will start the see the difference between the various species that live in the UK. Until recently it is only with the science of DNA testing that now that we are seeing the subtle difference between very similar looking gulls and that are many more subspecies than was first thought.

A ghost gull - the colour of dirty ice or wood ashes. It was like an ice-light or snow lantern on the shore.

Tim Dee has been a bird watcher since his teens, where he would try and look at almost anything with feathers, but he is becoming a “larophiles” or gull enthusiast as they pique his curiosity now. He heads to Essex to one of the main landfill sights for London to help catch and ring them and realises just how large they are when handling them. He travels backwards and forwards across the country seeking them, as well as heading to South Africa and then Madagascar to see their gulls. It is wide-ranging too, he finds gulls in books, those that have made it to the big screen as well as those that have had their fifteen minutes of infamy in the news. Mostly though this is a eulogy to a bird that most would not even consider worth watching, birds that he can see every day when he closes his front door in his home city of Bristol, birds that are intrinsically linked to us. Thought that this was another brilliant read from Tim Dee and after reading this I am never going to look at gull in the same way. Very highly recommended; if you haven’t read his other books, then I would urge you to do so.… (more)

Over the past thirty years, Common Ground has sought to link the places to the people that live in them. Formed by Sue Clifford, Angela King and the late writer Roger Deakin, with the intention of bringing together arts and environmental interests and engaging local responses to those places on a daily basis. They have instigated events like Apple Days and been the driving force for those creating community woodlands. They are a brilliant charity that deserves more recognition, and the batten, or should I say hazel pole, has been passed to the safe hands of Adrian Cooper and Gracie Burnett of the fantastic Little Toller.

In Ground Work, Tim Dee has collated the thoughts and observations of thirty-one of the finest landscape and natural history writers around. This poetic and literary collection is the response to the threat that is being posed by the 'soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species' that has turned our present day into a new epoch; the Anthropocene. This new era is already causing chaotic changes to our weather systems, there is the steady creep upwards in average temperature across the globe as well as significant and it some cases catastrophic changes to our environments.

The authors that have contributed to this collection include some of my favourites, Paul Farley, Fiona Sampson, Mark Cocker, Helen MacDonald, Adam Nicolson and Richard Mabey to name but a few. There are others that I have read a little of like John Burnside and a number that I have never come across before, such as Julia Blackburn and Sean Borodale. They were free to write about anything they chose, so not only do we have an amazing vein of prose from some of the best nature and landscape writers around, but they have given us a raft of different perspectives from places all around the world that are significant to them. The subjects are diverse too, there are musings on art, bridges, bees, sculpture, memories of childhood, fossils and the rapidly declining cuckoo. We travel from the high Arctic to an English woodland, allotments and summer meadows, post-industrial beaches to a desert road.

Rooted deep in the principles of Common Ground, this is a celebration of our how own local area can define us as much as our DNA and education, themes that are picked up in the fantastic 21st Century Yokel by Tom Cox. All the way through the various essays, you feel the comforting presence of Roger Deakin encouraging us to discover and explore our local patch regardless of whether it is an SSSI, a local park or an eerie holloway. This book goes a long way to addressing the way that some people consider that scouring their local area of anything natural makes them more human; it doesn’t, it makes us all less human. This is a fine companion volume to Arboreal, which is another Common Ground inspired work as a tribute to Oliver Rackman and the vital part that woodlands play in our well being. A truly excellent book.… (more)

This is the story of four fields on three different continents; his local field on the Cambridge fens a Zambian field, an America prairie and an abandoned field in Chernobyl in Ukraine.

Each of these locations has a story to tell, not only of the history that permeates them, but of the people that relied on them, the flora and fauna that inhabit them, and how they have been moulded to suit the will of man.

With his local field he describes the way that it changes throughout the seasons. The writing is beautiful and evocative; it almost makes you image in that you are standing alongside as he tells you the things that he is seeing. The fields that he visits abroad are so very different to the fens at home, from the fragile prairie, the wildness of the African farm and the abandonment of the file close to the scene of the nuclear disaster.

Nothing groundbreaking you might think, but with his acute observational skill and his eloquent descriptions of what he sees when he walks around these landscapes, make this a fine natural history book.… (more)

This was a present that I feel hopelessly unqualified to review.

Dee has spent half a century watching and listening to birds in Britain and around the world. He clearly has a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to share, but my experience of the subject is so limited that much of it went over my head (almost literally), and I was left sympathising with his son's "comically wilful ornithological ignorance".

I was able to appreciate the quality of the writing, the range and arrangement of the subject matter and the many poets quoted, but I must admit that for me it was a bit of a struggle to read.

No criticism of the book, the writer or the subject intended!… (more)