Desmond Nethersole-Thompson has been studying his favourite bird, the greenshank Tringa nebularia, since May 1932. This book, published in 1976, owes much to the interest, almost an obsession, of the Nethersole-Thompson family. The two girls and four boys, as well as both parents, now work as a team in the wild and beautiful north-west Highlands of Scotland. Greenshanks has drawn heavily on the team's field notebooks. In the gneiss country of Sutherland, so different from the forest bogs of Spey Valley, Fennoscandia and the Soviet Union, they have particularly concentrated on the greenshank's...
Desmond Nethersole-Thompson has been studying his favourite bird, the greenshank Tringa nebularia, since May 1932. This book, published in 1976, owes ...
"From mid-January to mid-April 1935 I was off on my dilapidated bicycle, but how different Speyside was from Breckland. In late February many crossbills were still in flocks; I had to walk and cycle for many miles before finding my first nest in the last week of March, when I located a small breeding group in a plantation of old pines close to a keeper's cottage. Thenceforward, until 1942, I followed the crossbills and slowly began to understand a little about them. At first everything was gloriously new. I watched my crossbills mating and discovered how subtly a winter flock changed to a...
"From mid-January to mid-April 1935 I was off on my dilapidated bicycle, but how different Speyside was from Breckland. In late February many crossbil...
