In Search of One Last Song by Parrick Galbraith

This title appealed to me when I came across it in the Gairloch Bookstore because it had 'disappearing birds and the people trying to save them' on the front cover.  That was to a large extent because of my fifteen year involvement with monitoring and protecting Hen Harriers in Cumbria.  I wanted to read about the ways that other pople were trying to give protection to threatened species of birds.

Beyond that I had looked in the index and found the names of people whom I'd either met or heard about.  This was going to be interesting !

On embarking on the text I found the style quite quirky, it certainly wasn't mundane.  There was a lot of incidental detail designed no doubt to set the scene and make the reader feel part of the conversations  taking place.  Some of these became rather waring and  repetitious - how many times did I want to hear of the sweat trickling down an assorted selection of arms, brows and more.  The people he had conversations with all seemed to have a propensity for 'sucking air between ther teeth' - again not something that I felt I needed to know about.  All in all the writer seemed to want to add colour to the narrative - but for me that was all a bit too forced and just too much.

The writer travels Britain and meets quite an array of rather marginalised characters.  There was little doubt that these people shared concerns about disappearing species, but were they really trying to save them in a purposeful way - it didn't seem like it.

There was nevertheless some interesting information of a historical nature sprinkled among the many unusual interactions but these took rather a lot of finding and many got buried under much seemingly irreleant detail.  On a few occasions I was just getting interested in his conversation with a particular character in some remote location when suddenly the narrative had jumped to somewhere completely different and new characters and locations were introduced in a confusing way without sufficient context.

Ultimately if you like flights of fancy with endless questionable detail then this is a book for you.  If on the other hand you want to learn about some of the many people who are working hard to save species through hard work on the ground or habitat requirement research then you should probably look elsewhere.