The most dazzling picture books of the year

By MARCUS BERKMANN

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-14166461/Taylor-perfect-winters-day-dazzling-picture-books-year.html

Living With Greys by Tarquin Millington-Drake Merlin Unwin £50, 160pp

Here’s the first of this Christmas’s big eco-books, a sweet and hopeful tale of grey partridges, one of the country’s most endangered bird species. Tarquin Millington-Drake is a photographer, fly-fisher and travel expert who found, to his luck, that there was a grey partridge restoration project at George Ponsonby’s farm down the road. He spent many happy hours stalking, learning about and photographing the birds, and then wrote this book about them.

Grey partridges originally fell foul of intensive farming methods but now, thanks to habitat renewal with lots of nice tasty insects for them to eat, their numbers are on the up, from 17 pairs in 2017 on Ponsonby’s farm to 135 pairs now.

Millington-Drake’s book is a slow-burning labour of love, and his photography is luminescent.