What a fantastic day Sunday was! Live on the Vroege Vogels radio programme, we heard that Crossbill authors Constant Swinkels and Dirk Hilbers had won the Audience Award of the Dutch Nature Book Prize 2026 (Natuurboekenprijs) for the Crossbill Guide Netherlands.
Together with Horst Wolter, illustrator of this and so many other Crossbill Guides, Oscar Lourens, who designed the book, Rob Baars and Paul Kemmeren from the Crossbill Guides Foundation board, and Nicole van Hoorn, director of KNNV Publishing, they were there to receive the award.
The fact that this is the Audience Award makes it particularly special. There is, after all, a little bit of a mission behind this book: to challenge the all-too-common claim that ‘there is no real nature left in the Netherlands’. We couldn’t disagree more. The Netherlands has an extraordinarily rich and distinctive diversity of landscapes and wildlife, shaped in part by centuries of interaction between nature and human land use. Dismissing all this as ‘not real nature’ is not only wrong; it is also harmful, because it undermines appreciation for – and ultimately the conservation of – this unique natural heritage.
That makes it all the more rewarding that this recognition came from the public. A huge thank you to everyone who worked behind the scenes to make the book possible, and to everyone who voted for us – or for one of the other wonderful nature books on the shortlist!