Current Nature Writing Projects
What would have been my mother's 80th birthday seems a good time to acknowledge the degree to which my own interest in wildlife and nature writing is owed directly to her influence. Not only was my mum someone who encouraged a respect for the natural world in daily life, she was also able to do so through her work in nurseries and with younger school children, not least through the production of some factual descriptions of British wildlife for child readers. It is no mawkish exagerration to say that I learned more from these lovingly crafted educational provisions than from many "official" nature books. One of my childhood memories is of my mother supporting a "Save the Whales" campaign in the 1980's, and it was therefore a somewhat bittersweet irony that I was reading a book about whales at the time of her death. The work of Sally Carrighar and other naturalists such as JA Baker, Rachel Carson, Nan Shephard, Valmik Thapar and Ann Zwinger, has directly