Australian Backyard Naturalist

 

So this book was about being a naturalist anywhere, and in the second edition, I added plants and microscopy, lifting a bit from Looking at Small Things (we will come to that later).

This book won a major award, it remains popular with kids, so please, give it a look. Recommended for kids older than seven, but grandparents find it a marvellous way to entertain the young. This is an excellent tool for lighting fires in young hearts and minds.

The joint winner of the almost-as-prestigious W.A. Premier's Award for Children's Literature in 2012, this book is about looking at things in the outdoors. It is probably the book I care most about, because it liberates kids (as I like to say, from 8 to 88) to bother the wildlife in non-harmful ways,

It was the fact that it was missing from the shop shelves that triggered people to email me, asking where they could get copies, and that in turn provoked me to take all of my titles back.

The "backyard" here is highly elastic. I was stuck with the term, because these books were seen as part of a series that started with Ragbir Bhathal's Australian Backyard Astronomy, but as an old anarchist/surrealist bureaucrat, I have never allowed rules to get in the way. My backyard is anywhere I can get to (and back from), before dark.

There are two choices to buy it:

An ebook in full colour for Kindle AUD $8 and

A print-on-demand paperback in full colour, because of the photos. AUD $50

The base page for all of these is here.