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I would give anything to have written his parody of overstrained journalistic writing: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”

“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole — would that be it?”

It's taken until the last slot to get to a book that is by most definitions "proper nature writing" in the sense of sustained descriptive writing about the natural world affectionately satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop with "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole".

The green tints of spring, or the warmer brown of autumn, seemed to make no difference, for the shades were always blue, dull and heavy, mingling with the thin filmy mist that rose up from the plashy ground on either side of the road.

Red flamingoes haunt "The plashy brink, or marge of river wide," while on the broad open plain the birds most seen are crows!