Claxton – Field Notes from a small planet by Mark Cocker

Published by Jonathan Cape September 2014

Hardback Price £14.99 No of pages 238

ISBN 978 0 224 09965 3

After the mammoth work of his ‘Birds and People’ Mark has put together a series of his Guardian newspaper articles . Whereas a diary covers a full year these days cover the best of 12 years with location and date at the top of each day. Most of these are based around his home village of Claxton in Norfolk which seems to be a great place to live if you like watching wildlife. Many aspects of this book come out with little gems regarding Swallows living with man in caves and even Roman mosaics in Germany portraying Fieldfare captured to eat in AD150 even finding grasshoppers in the middle of a motorway! But most of the field work is certainly in the and around the village with amazing lists of the village species found in the back of the book. The Index helps you find individual species to read about and may have been best used in content at the front. This is a book you can pick up any time and read extracts from and will be well used coming out of the book shelf along with his other 10 books.