Nature Detective

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Very Good/Very Good. 1979. Second Impression. Hard Cover. 4to 0575025026 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Colour & b/w photographs. 254 pages clean and tight. "Nature detective work, the reading of animal tracks and signs, is a skill that must have been second nature to early man, but is now almost entirely forgotten. And yet, for any person of any age who has any interest whatever in wildlife, tracking can become an absorbing pastime. "Nearly everywhere in the countryside there are stories to be read-if we have eyes to see, and use our intelligence to interpret what we see. Moorland and mountainside, common land, fells, sand dunes, sea shore and estuary, fields and hedgerows, lakeside, river and stream, even the garden at home, offer unlimited opportunities for nature detective work. There are tell-tale signs on plants, bushes, rocks, branches and the bark of trees. In wet grass, sand, mud, snow or soft earth are footprints, scrapes, scratches and scuffles. Even where the ground is too hard to register an imprint, there may be feathers, droppings, pellets, wisps of fur: clues from which we can deduce what creatures have been there before us; what they have been up to, and why. "All my life I have been interested in the natural world about me, both professionally as a writer and director of wildlife films for television, and privately as a sportsman and painter. And over the years I have learned from my own observations and from contact with such superb naturalists as Niko Tinbergen, George Dunnet, Hans Kruuk, Peter Parks and many others with whom I have had the privilege of working, the fascination of studying the behaviour of animals in their natural habitat, and the value of nature detective work in the understanding of that behaviour. "This is a very personal book, largely about my own neighbourhood and some of the creatures that share it with me. It is intended not for the expert, but for the very ordinary person like myself who has no specialized knowledge; an attempt quite simply to pass on some idea of how much extra pleasure and interest nature detective work can add to one's casual enjoyment of the countryside." .