Wild Life of Britain, F Fraser Darling

In Wild Life of Britain, F Fraser Darling passionately describes the rich variety of the countryside. Illustrated with 8 colour plates and 28 colour illustrations, the book takes you through the creatures of the country’s land, sky and waters as well as its natural history and naturalists from Britain and abroad. (Though, unless we’re mistaken, he does not mention a single female naturalist or scientist even though the book being published in 1943 — two years after Rachel Carson’s Under The Sea Wind, and with no mention of British naturalist and humanitarian Oriana Fanny Wilson, CBE, though almost a full page praising her husband).

This was the first book ever donated to The Nature Library, from the hands of artist Wil Freeborn, for which we are forever grateful.

Sir Frank Fraser Darling FRSE (1903-1979) was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist and author. He gives his name to the Fraser Darling effect, the simultaneous and shortened breeding season that occurs in large colonies of birds. Fraser Darling proposed the effect in 1938 after studying herring gulls off the English coast, where he noticed that individual gulls rarely raised their young past the fledgling stage.