Britain supports a wide variety of species found nowhere else on Earth. But many of these are seldom celebrated and in some cases barely known. James Harding-Morris, who has just written a new book, 'Endemic', looks in greater detail at our special wildlife.

Birders probably know more about endemic species than most other people. When travelling abroad, birders often plan trips around the species that occur nowhere else on Earth – after all, you’ll never get the chance to see them anywhere else.

But in case anyone needs a definition, an endemic species is an organism restricted to a single defined geographic location. Giant Panda is endemic to China; Dodo was endemic to Mauritius and Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch is, unsurprisingly, only found on Gran Canaria.

Typically, the term endemic is used to refer to ‘national’ endemics; those species found within a single country. When defined in this way, endemics make the greatest contribution to rates of global extinctions. More than 90% of the extinct species and subspecies recorded by the IUCN were national endemics.