Winter Survival: nature's ways of coping with the cold

Where we live now, winter comes early and stays late, and by this time of year we've already had enough of it, so it's great to sit by the fire with a book that makes the season seem worthwhile. For here winter is presented as the waiting time - the natural world getting its act together for its next growing binge and going into survival mode - the variants of which and the way different animals and plants employ them being the harden of this book. So we get hibernation, migration, leaf-fall, delayed implantation and all the rest, but not in a pedestrian account (though the author's a great walker) but in aremarkable mix of hard fact, folklore, reminiscence and personal opinion. The author takes her own rambling but enthusiastic route through her subject, enriching every step with observation and loading the reader with nuggets of knowledge at every turn. For she is a compulsive informant who can't bear not to tell us what she knows, and luckily she writes and draws beautifully so a delightful and unique book results. As it is so personal an account it has the added value of reading aloud superbly and thus being eminently shareable. So this is a family book -compelling reading at one sitting if you like but forever a source of delightful dips - a Friend for life, you might say. When the author produced Small Wonder two years ago it seemed as if it might be just that - a brilliant one-off. Now it seems that there might be plenty more where that came from. We must grab all we can of this amiable talent.