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Books

Why the cheating cuckoo may finally be getting its comeuppance

The ornithologist Mark Cocker is full of admiration for Nick Davies’s Cuckoo — as gripping as any detective story

21 March 2015

9:00 AM

21 March 2015

9:00 AM

Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature Nick Davies

Bloomsbury, pp.320, £16.99, ISBN: 9781408856567

In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with emotion, while the descriptions of place and wildlife often serve as a hazy green backcloth against which the author depicts the main subject —their own personalities.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to find a new nature book that returns to a traditional format.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £13.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Mark Cocker is a naturalist and author of Crow Country, Birds and People and Birds Britannica (with Richard Mabey).

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