Richard Broughton is the perfect person to write a book on the Marsh Tit Poecile palustris, having spent 25 years studying a population of up to 22 pairs at Monks Wood, Cambridgeshire. The lucky man was paid to do so (amongst other tasks) as an employee of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, which owns the site, and his work on the understudied species was so thorough that he wrote it up to gain a PhD.