NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE (GILBERT WHITE) (PB)

A century before Charles Darwin, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home and he is now considered England's first ecologist. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made instruments. Bird song and seasonal migrations were noted. The feeding habits of frogs, bats and mice were jotted into his diaries and nature journals, as were the simple delights he felt hearing a cricket in the meadow or a blackbird in the hedgerows. The extraordinary detail of the natural history he described has given us, two hundred years later, a glimpse into ecosystems untouched by industry and an account of how changes in global climate can affect local weather patterns.