Stephen Moss is a lifelong naturalist, bestselling author and prolific broadcaster. In a distinguished career at the BBC Natural History Unit his credits included the BAFTA-award-winning Springwatch, Birding with Bill Oddie and The Nature of Britain. His books include The Robin, The Wren, The Swallow, The Swan, The Owl, The Starling and The Puffin. He is the outgoing President of the Somerset Wildlife Trust and a Visting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University. Originally from London, he now lives with his wife and children on the Somerset Levels.

Moss’s prettily illustrated book is full of such curiosities. Gratifyingly, though, it steers clear of becoming a dry deluge of facts, a pitfall of so much ornithological writing… Moss, a nature broadcaster and a lecturer in creative writing, is a good storyteller, seamlessly linking biological fact with the anecdotal… There is no doubt that Moss’s book, with its charming cover and quaint illustrations, will make it into many a stocking this year. Yet, this is far more than a book for Christmas. There is a serious message here. The more we learn about our favourite bird, the more we realise how much we don’t know. This gulf is evidence of how we have become distanced from the natural world… Moss’s charming paean to this bird that lives hard and dies young reminds us that it deserves to be more than a whimsical symbol of festive cheer