Islands Beyond the Horizon: The life of twenty of the world's most remote places [Hardcover]

Naturalist Roger Lovegrove, probably best known for his book "Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation's Wildlife" has written an interesting account of 20 very special islands he has visited in his long career. It's perhaps worth listing them all so that island-lovers can see this is not the usual rather tired list of over-familiar islands, so here goes, in chapter order: Wrangel, Chinijo Archipelago, Jan Mayen, Mykines, Guam, San Blas Islands, Ascension, Fernando de Noronha, Mingulay, Pico, Tristan da Cunha, Vigur, St Kilda, South Georgia, Halfmoon Island (Spitsbergen), Great Skellig, Île aux Aigrettes, Solovetski Islands, St Peter and St Paul Rocks, Tuamotu Archipelago. He set foot on all these except the St Peter and St Paul Rocks, isolated jagged rocks covering just 4 acres (less than 2 hectares), lost in the middle of the Atlantic half-way between Brazil and West Africa: sea conditions were so bad he could only examine the rocks for a few hours from a boat lying offshore.

How many of us would love to see even a handful of these islands? Some are relatively easy of access (even if expensively), such as Guam in the Pacific, Pico in the Azores, and Vigur in Iceland, but others are only ever likely to be accessible to a lucky few. What links them together, of course, is their wildlife, especially their birds (Lovegrove was RSPB Director for Wales for 27 years), and the effect that modern humans have had on it. Even the inhospitable St Peter and St Paul Rocks have not escaped: Darwin claimed he saw a multitude of sea-fowl there, but today numbers are very modest, thanks probably to the lighthouse and permanent research station now there. In many cases, such as St Kilda, people lived from and in harmony with their wildlife, taking only enough for their own sustenance and that of future generations, but modern commercial priorities, such as on South Georgia. have often had dramatic and disastrous impacts. Lovegrove details all this, but at the same time looks everywhere at the positive efforts now being made to redress the situation, such as eradication of introduced predators like rats, and conservation of critically-endangered species.

This is a very interesting book about 20 fascinating islands: the best chapters by far are those where the author gives the reader a personal feel for the place from his own experiences (Great Skellig and Solovetstki immediately come to mind), but in other cases his accounts, although interesting, can be a little dry and tell you little more than can be found in Wikipedia. If you manage a follow-up, Mr Lovegrove, please tell us more about what YOU did and saw there!

Oh, and there are rather too many mistakes that a publisher of the standing of OUP should have seen to: for example, Iceland's Vestmannaeyjar is always translated into English as Westman Islands; there is no such place as the Westermann Islands.

These book is about remote islands, some I didn't know much about them. Now I know, but I'm curious to lern more.

The book conveys well the author's feelings about the many different islands, the varying successes and failures of conservation of the species on each and their fragility, particularly resulting from pressures of negative human interferance.
It would have benefited from more illustrations clearly curtailed due to production costs. The legend on plate 20 is incorrect.