Happy 90th birthday to Brian Jackman, that great chronicler of nature at home and abroad, who I understand is working on more books, including one on the West Country and one about a dynasty of cheetahs in South Africa’s Great Karoo.

You can still read a couple of extracts from his earlier works here on Deskbound Traveller: one on the Namibian Desert and one on peregrines in Cornwall.

Long before Brian had set eyes on the Maasai Mara, he had conjured it in his head as a boy in a park in a suburb of London. His writing about those days helped to lift me out of lockdown during Covid.