Stephen Moss

Go pishing for birds; become a bat detective; take a city safari; find snakes and lizards; identify spiders and their webs; look for owl pellets... Make nettle soup; or itching powder from rosehips; make a bark rubbing; an elder-stem peashooter; or elderflower fritters. Wake up in time to hear the dawn chorus; listen to the heartbeat of a tree; or just stand out in the rain for half an hour... With The Bumper Book Of Nature the whole family will want to switch off the television and computer, pull on their wellingtons and get outside to discover the endless bounty, beauty and fascination of nature right on our doorstep. Lavishly designed with over 160 full-colour illustrations of British wildlife and flora, along with gorgeous black-and-white line drawings throughout, this beautiful and timeless book will be treasured for years to come by children and adults alike.

The Bumper Book of Nature

Sarah Sammis

The Bumper Book of Nature: A User's Guide to the Great Outdoors by Stepehen Moss

The book is beautifully crafted but it is flawed. Essentially it's written to recapitulate the author's child (with a heaping of load of "kids these days" condensation). So it starts with the insulting introduction to parents who are too stupid to let their kids play out back (or even to know what grows near them) and moves on from there. While the book contains some lovely color pages of "typical American" flora and fauna, again the book is heavily skewed to the north eastern states. So for twenty pictures of flowers, there's a tossed in California poppy. For trees, there's a redwood. Etc. Basically the non eastern examples are the most obvious, ubiquitous species that any dumb (see introduction) kid would already know. 

MEH.

The Bumper Book of Nature

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