Book Review: The Complete Naturalist, by Nick Baker

Any book with practical advice on how to rear dragonflies, clean skeletons and make a moth trap, is going to be a winner in this house. There are few books that cover this kind of material, so we have mined The Complete Naturalist* for projects and advice.

Nick Baker is a well-known British naturalist, with an engaging and personable style of writing. Although UK-based, he has travelled widely and the book references many countries. Of course most of the techniques are widely useful, regardless of location.

The 352 pages are arranged into chapters that each focus on a species group (birds, mammals, reptiles & amphibians, fish, invertebrates, plants & fungi), with information on “what they are and how they live their lives”. There is also a chapter on useful equipment.

Each chapter includes ideas for projects as well as details of skills and investigative techniques, and these are the real gold in this book. The projects are quite achievable; many are low-tech, but effective. For example, using a modified ice-cream container with cling film to observe aquatic species.

The specific and practical details reward a thorough reading. Interesting details include how to coax a spider out of its hole, that a mirror on a flexible stick works well for searching rock pool crevices, that polarising sunglasses enable you to see below the surface of water, that a scrap of paper towel in a container can calm an insect down while you observe it, that tic tac boxes make good collecting containers, that dragonflies are most likely to emerge during the early morning or evening, and that a glass aquarium is less likely to break if you put a cork mat underneath it.

There are colour photographs on most pages and many of the suggested activities are illustrated by Lizzie Harper with visually appealing diagrams.

The Complete Naturalist acknowledges a debt to Gerald & Lee Durrell’s book The Amateur Naturalist, first published in 1982 by Dorling Kindersley. That book was organised more around habitat and relied more heavily on diagrams - although some of the photos of what might be found in a particular habitat were (and still are) especially inspiring.

The level of The Complete Naturalist is aimed at amateurs rather than children, though it is accessible and appealing to them as well. The number and level of projects greatly exceeds the typical ‘things kids can do outdoors’ book.

Something to be aware of is that not all the projects translate to other countries. In New Zealand there are no opportunities for observing snakes, badgers, newts or woodpeckers! More seriously, in NZ it’s against the law to handle lizards without a permit, or to possess native birds even if they are dead. Also, captive frogs should not be released back into the wild, so as not to spread the amphibian chytrid fungus. For New Zealand information on these matters, a good place to start is the Department of Conservation.

Other books by the same author include: RSPB Nature Tracker’s Handbook, Nick Baker’s Bug Book : Discover the World of the Mini-beast!, Bug Zoo and most recently ReWild: The Art of Returning to Nature (2017). He also writes for magazines and features in multiple wildlife programmes and radio shows, and his web site can be found at http://www.nickbaker.tv

The real value of the book to us are the many detailed tips and tricks mentioned along the way, and the projects. If you need further convincing that it might be worth your while to track a copy down, here is a further sampling of projects included in the book: catching crickets, rearing butterflies & moths, making pitfall traps for invertebrates, making a moth trap, making a bee box, building an ant town (formicarium), pond dipping, slime surfing (looking at the underside of snails moving across glass), collecting sea shells, making a wormery, testing for oxygen released by aquatic plants, using quadrats to record plant cover, estimating tree height, pressing plants, making spore prints from fungi, making casts of tracks, recording bird calls, and keeping an aquarium. What’s not to like!

* Versions

There are several versions of this book by Nick Baker. The most recent one is reviewed here: The Complete Naturalist. It was published in 2015 by Bloomsbury, with a portion of proceeds going to RSPB (a UK-based conservation group).

Previous versions:

• The First-time Naturalist, published by Collins in 2005.

• The New Amateur Naturalist, published by HarperCollins in 2004.