Böcker av Sir John Lister-Kaye

Footprints in the Woods is John Lister-Kaye's account of a year spent observing the comings and goings of otters, beavers, badgers, weasels and pine martens. This family - Mustelidae - all live in the wild at Aigas, the conservation and field study centre that has been John's home for more that forty-five years.With the patient and meticulous care of a true naturalist, John observes and records the lives, habits and habitats of these elusive animals. Hours of careful waiting and watching in the woods and loch, the river, fields and moorland is rewarded with insight into how these animals live when unhindered by human interference; sometimes red in tooth and claw, but often playful, familial, curious and surprising.As a boy, badgers and weasels were John's first encounter with wild animals, now he has spent fifty years living side-by side with them in the Highlands and come to know much of their ways. Footprints in the Woods is the culmination of that long association with the Mustelidae family, a love letter to the otters, beavers, badgers, weasels and pine martens that also call Aigas home, and a reminder of the fragility of habitat and the beauty and variety we have to lose if we don't choose to actively protect it.

A lyrical celebration of the British countryside from one of our best-known nature writers

Sir John Lister-Kaye encourages us to look in close detail at the nature around us.

As I write Hermione's twelfth year is drawing to a close. The years of innocence are waning. But we have had the good fortune to live through a period when a child's mind is wide open and as absorbent as a sponge. Blessed years of exploration and discovery, fat and full of the natural world, which surrounds her here ... the mountains and forests and ospreys, eagles, otters and pine martens of a beautiful land.' NATURE'S CHILD is John Lister-Kaye's account of bringing up his daughter to appreciate the nature around her so beloved to himself. It is also a moving meditation on that world, and on their relationship, as he shows her how caterpillars metamorphose into moths; how beavers build dams in Norway; how half a million sea birds migrate to Shetland once a year to breed; how white rhinos behave in the wilds of Swaziland; how baby polar bears are raised on an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. As John puts it: 'Life is a collection of fragments of time charged with deeply personal sensation and meaning ... we had watched polar bears for a few minutes, but the recollection of those images are locked in for life. What is love if not time given in joy and delight?

* A lyrical memoir from Highland naturalist John Lister-Kaye, founder of the famous Aigas Field Centre, this is old-fashioned nature writing at its very best.