New Holland Concise Seashore Wildlife Guide

I am quite lucky, my old man lives by the sea (the not so glamorous Margate, Kent) so I and my family have free (well travel expenses aside) trips to the coast pretty much when we want (assuming he isn’t off on one of his world trips), what this really means is that we get to explore the nature of the rock pools and seashore (assuming we can drag the kids away from the beach or arcade for five minutes), so when we were offered a copy of the New Holland Concise Seashore Wildlife Guide we jumped at it.

The book is small, another of their pocket guides, but still manages to cover 15 chapters ; Seaweeds, Flowering Plants, Lichens, Sponges, Jellyfishes, Sea-anemones, Bristle Worms, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Insects, Sea-Spiders, Echinoderms, Fishes, Birds and Mammals . as with the Concise Pond Wildlife Guide each subject is split to individual species accounts written on a one page per subject basis with a drawing and a small blurb about each one (with the exception of the birds where species sometimes share pages). And again there is a pull out comparison “poster” at the rear of the plastic cover book for extra help.

Again as with my previous review of Concise pond wildlife the images in this book are fantastic but alas only one per species so are a little limiting and the writing although helping doesn’t have as much detail as I would like, but this is the sort of trade off you have to accept for a concise pocket guide.

We have not used this book as much as I would like us to we just haven’t made it to the coast as often as we would like (sorry Nana and granddad, although this review is posting while we are visiting them), but when we have taken it out with us it has helped us to identify a few creatures, or more accurately their shells.

Bo loves it, as she can carry it around easily and then becomes the keeper of the information (which she loves), as I said earlier I would prefer a book with more, but that is probably just me, I like a good bulky field guide even if my back doesn’t!

Light, easy to carry, and full of great drawings, we do love the book and have found it really useful, the kids are happy with it, so it is just me that wants more. The low cost makes it cheap enough to not worry about taking out around the dangers of the sea so it is an ideal family book, you just may want to supplement it with a more detailed book for use at home.