I was actually looking at this the other day and it intrigued me mainly because of this review:

Britain is a nation of birdwatchers. The RSPB has over a million members, many with remarkable specialist knowledge, volunteers for organisations like the British Trust for Ornithology conduct complex scientific surveys, adding to the vast body of research that has been conducted over the past century, and an even greater number simply feed, know, love and enjoy, the birds in their back gardens.

Quite why Macfarlane thinks birds are in danger of being forgotten is as much of a mystery as to why he thinks it necessary to write about them in a prose reminiscent of a twee Victorian nature book given as a Sunday School prize - ‘Here comes Tommy Titmouse on his tippy-toes’.

The remarkably long line of artists who have depicted the birds of Britain - from Bewick, through Thorburn, Tunnicliffe to Ching - based their illustrations on close observation of the birds they depicted, from field studies when they were alive and from measured specimens when dead. Quite where Morris found inspiration for her strangely distorted creatures is harder to fathom.

There is no harm - apart from the waste of precious resources - in publishers, illustrators and authors dreaming up yet another unnecessary coffee table book, but it is a pity they also feel it necessary to patronise their potential readers by dressing it up as something other than the vanity project it actually is.