Book Review: Red Sixty Seven

This is a lovely, sad and important book. It's a series of essays and paintings about the sixty-seven British birds on the UK Red List. These are Birds of Conservation Concern, a polite way of saying they are seriously threatened with being wiped out.

Each bird has it's own writer and artist so the book has a wealth of styles in both words and pictures. 
It's a wonderful book to browse, reading about favourite birds, admiring the beautiful paintings. Lest you forget the message it's there on every page though, with details of the BOCC Status and the Red-List Criteria - globally threatened, decline, decline, decline repeated over and over.

There are birds here that are little known but what's shocking is how many are very familiar - starling, song thrush, herring gull, cuckoo, puffin, house sparrow and many more. That these birds are disappearing shows just what an appalling state our countryside and wild places are in.

Red Sixty Seven is the brainchild of Kit Jewitt (aka YOLObirder) who introduces and curates the book. All the writers and artists gave their work for free and all moneys raised from sales goes to Red-listed species conservation projects run by the British Trust for Ornithology and the RSPB. The book is published by the BTO from whom it can be purchased for £19.99 + postage. It deserves to be a big success.