This book is about the search of the people who are trying to save our birds, wildlife and wild places which are disappearing at alarming rate. It confronts the enormity of what losing them would really mean. Very thought provoking and touching as this worry is expressed through artists

A beautifully written journey around the country discovering the people that have been trying to save birds from extinction, and the author discovers so many interesting people, its more than that, its really about people and their relationship with the land, I found it so moving. Thoroughly recommend.

The author's meeting with a cross section of folk working in bird conservation, talking about the birds they love. Not the usual conservation suspects, but farmers and keepers along with poets and RSPB types. The subjects sometimes had very differing opinions from each other. They also often differ and argue against the usual conservation narrative. This made for interesting reading.

Reading this in short bursts rather than a few longer sittings I was sometime confused by jumps between different conversations and subject. Each voice appeared and left without out much of a formal introduction & conclusion.

I wanted to love it, and I can see what the author was trying to do, but I just don't think it really worked. There was too much focus on the people themselves and not enough relating to birds. Sometimes it would go pages and pages without mentioning them at all. This would be fine if the people featured were particularly compelling but many of them weren't really and I found my interest waning. In my personal experience, the bird watching community is pretty hostile and unwelcoming to women so it was a shame to not see very many women featured and those who were were on their periphery of the men's stories e.g. their wives. It just didn't really work for me sadly.

Review not posted anywhere else.

I struggled somewhat with 'In Search of One Last Song'. The author's heart is clearly in the right place, and he clearly has a lot of passion as well as writing talent - but the execution of the book left much to be desired, in my view.

The main problem was the amount of extraneous detail. You could chop maybe a fifth or sixth of the text away without any loss - all the scenes that didn't involve birds, and were simply observations of random people that Galbraith saw on his wanderings. And yes, in certain contexts and in certain books, such content is appropriate and fitting - but they didn't belong in a book that is presented as being about birds heading towards extinction, and the people who love them.

I also wish there'd been more women featured. There are as many men in the book called Patrick as there are women being interviewed (excluding briefly-mentioned wives). There were more descriptions of the narrator or his interview subjects going for a piss - six, in fact (which is six too many). The author even found the word count to mention the time he saw a man masturbating in a car. Really not my kind of nature-writing.

I've given three stars rather than two because there are still some shining moments in the book, but you have to wade through a lot of non-important stuff to get to them.

(With thanks to 4th Estate & William Collins and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)

The United Kington is one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. Since 1970, there has been on average almost a 70% decline in the populations of many mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, with some species expected to disappear entirely within the next few decades. Within the pages of In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s Disappearing Birds and the People Trying to Save Them, Patrick Galbraith considers ten species of bird: the nightingale, hen harrier, lapwing, black grouse, kittiwake, capercaillie, turtle dove, grey partridge, bittern and corncrake. All were once abundant, or relatively so. Now, even the most enthusiastic nature-lover will count themselves lucky to encounter the majority of these species even once in their lifetime.

This isn’t a book to approach if you are looking for scientific fact or copious information about how each species lives and what might be done to boost their populations. The emphasis here is very much on people - those people living and working in the habitats where these birds remain. Patrick Galbraith has essentially written a nature-based travelogue, with plenty of conversational dialogue with the people he has encountered.

A sobering and thought-provoking read.