My study is filled with books on hunting and shooting, beasts and butterflies, flowers and fungi, but mainly books on birds. I’ve never counted, but there are hundreds of them, ranging from David Bannerman’s masterly 12-volume work, The Birds of the British Isles, to my most recent acquisition, Gary Kramer’s magnificent Waterfowl of the World (fabulous photographs), but there’s not a single volume even remotely like Patrick Galbraith’s In Search of One Last Song.
When I picked it up, I suspected that it was going to be just another bird book, as its subtitle suggests. But I soon discovered that it’s not really about birds at all. It’s about people, though mainly people who are concerned, one way or another, with Britain’s disappearing birds. They range from conservationists to gamekeepers,…
