In Search of One Last Song by Patrick Galbraith

WILLIAM COLLINS, £18.99 REVIEW BY ROGER COX

Whether or not the so-called New Nature Writing has an identifiable Year Zero is up for debate, but the genre was perhaps most effectively defined in 2008, when Granta brought out a special New Nature Writing-themed edition. In his introduction, editor Jason Cowley observed that the writers “don’t simply want to walk into the wild, to rhapsodize and commune: they aspire to see with a scientific eye and write with literary effect”.

Patrick Galbraith is a New Nature Writer of the old school: one who combines a detailed knowledge of his subject with a style that is at once evocative and precise.

While the birds he goes in search of are the focus (“it dawned on me,” he writes in his introduction, “that if I didn’t hear a nightingale, a turtle dove or a capercaillie soon, I probably never would”) the people he meets in his efforts to encounter them provide much of the interest.

On the lookout for nightingales in

Suffolk, he goes stalking with marine turned private security guard Jim, who shoots around 100 muntjack deer each year to allow hawthorn and bramble to develop – vital cover for ground-nesting birds.

On the trail of lapwings in Manchester, he undertakes an urban bike safari with clubbing and birding enthusiast James Walsh, who shows him the lapwings’ “last stronghold” near a sewage works, and enthuses about bird-watching on acid. He also spends a day on Ilkley Moor with Luke Steele, a Yorkshire activist who campaigns against raptor persecution.

These various encounters (and they are very various) are written up with a forensic eye for detail, but also an admirable objectivity. The reader is left instead with a sense of the dizzying complexity of conservation efforts in these islands.

In scope and execution, this book is a hugely impressive achievement.