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Last year there was a spate of books specifically about bird “behavior” – though one might well say that every book about birds, from field guides on up, is about behavior in some way or another. It’s the behavior that makes them fascinating to us. Well, purely physical attributes play a part, too: they’re pretty good looking.).
A breeding bird atlas is a special kind of book. For birders, it’s the extremely large book, shelved in a place where it can’t crush the field guides, used to research the history of a bird in their area. The resulting book, 616 pages in length, 6.4 The resulting book, 616 pages in length, 6.4
The adventure of the second European Breeding Bird Atlas, or EBBA2, was the topic of one of my first posts here at 10,000 Birds: In a warm Catalonian March, Barcelona is filled with sunlight and full of Rose-ringed and Monk Parakeets. This book has an imposing presence on every desk: a 24 × 31 cm / 9.4
Award-winning free-lance science journalist Nicola Jones , most noted for her work on climate change and environmental issues, ventured into the book world with a picture book on the wildlife rehabilitation efforts for one of North America’s most endangered bird species, the Northern Spotted Owl.
Penguins are cartoons, emoticons, animated films, children’s books (though owls really take first place here), sports teams, a book publisher, and a Batman villain (a rare example of penguin negativity, though Burgess Meredith did bring an endearing attitude to his 1960’s TV portrayal).
Although Henslow’s had been reliably found in nearby Sharon Springs for many years, the last documented sighting was in 2008, and the sighting startled longtime birders, waking them up to the fact that breeding sites in the state were rapidly being lost. Not an enticing subject, I think.
A new book about the angelic-looking, identification-stumping birds of the oceans, rivers, and marshes has finally been published! That would be Terns of Europe and North America by Klaus Malling Olsen and Hans Larsson, published in 1995, another fantastic book, but out-of-print and in need of an update. Tern lovers rejoice!
2019), and now this book. The progression could be said to echo that of an earlier book about an obsessive nature criminal, The Orchard Thief by Susan Orlean, which started out as an article in The New Yorker.). The book is structured cinematically. wrote a lengthy article in Outside magazine (Jan. Author Joshua Hammer.
The travels in his most recent book Natural Encounters: Biking, Hiking, and Birding Through the Seasons are more limited — to the eastern part of the United States, mostly Washington, D.C. Beehler’s blog includes lots of photos; the book has few of those but a number of good drawings by John C.
Producing a book about birds and nesting is a dangerous business. Some people love books like that. Third, observing and photographing breeding birds and their young have become acts of ethical confusion as birders, photographers, and organizational representatives debate the impact of our human presence on the nesting process.
His second book on migration is a tale of many birds and many research studies all connected by the theme of migration and by his thoughtful narrative voice. The book is organized into ten chapters, framed by a Prologue and Epilogue focused on Weidensaul’s banding experience in Denali National Park.
Life Along the Delaware Bay: Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds , by Lawrence Niles, Joanna Burger, and Amanda Dey, is a book with a mission. The numbers, as detailed in this book, are alarming: the horseshoe crab harvest grew from less than 100,000 in 1992 to over 2.5 million in the late 1990’s.
In a birding world that celebrates identification, there are surprisingly few articles and books on gull identification.** There’s been a lot of excitement about this book. Pete Dunne has written and co-written 21 books (by my count, Wikipedia needs to update its entry!) This is their second co-authored book.
So, when Redgannet asked me if I was interested in reviewing Phillipps’ Field Guide to the Birds of Borneo: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei and Kalimantan, Third Edition , by Quentin Phillipps and Karen Phillipps, a book he had acquired at Birdfair, I hesitated. Did I dare dip my toe into this catalog of tantalizing species?
” The book in question is Birds of Bolivia: Field Guide , edited and written by Sebastian K. The source of this ranking, BirdLife International, lists Bolivia as currently having 1,439 bird species, including 18 breeding endemics. The downside of the size (and quality of paper) is that this is a fairly heavy book, about 2.5
The length of each bird species account varies, depending on whether the bird is native or a “visitor” (the book’s term for migrant) or vagrant, breeding or non breeding. The book is entitled South Georgia, but it also covers nearby areas including the South Sandwich Islands, Shag and Clerke Rocks.)
I could go on and on, it’s that kind of a book—a comprehensive treatment of a species we respect and adore, based on the most current research, written in a style that, while factual, is from the author’s viewpoint, flavoring facts with a witty, observant personal quality. Scott Weidensaul is a nature writer with roots in journalism.
The second edition of the National Geographic Complete Birds of North America, 2nd Edition has one of the longest book names in bird bookdom: National Geographic Complete Birds of North America, 2nd Edition: Now Covering More Than 1,000 Species With the Most-Detailed Information Found in a Single Volume. This volume is no exception.
This book is a field guide treat for traveling birders and birders who love to fantasize about travel, answering that age-old question, “I’m going on a trip to [fill in the blank—Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras], what field guide should I use?”. Of course, this is an identification guide, not a coffee table book.
And so, I turn to Better Birding: Tips, Tools & Concepts for the Field , the new book by George L. This is a very different book from what I expected, less of a handbook and more of a comprehensive identification text on 24 groups of birds, presented in words and photographs. Armistead and Brian L.
Mosco is also the author of Birding Is My Favorite Video Game: Cartoons about the Natural World (2018, a collection of Bird and Moon comics); co-author of several children’s books, including The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid (2018) with Dylan Thuras and Joy Ang, Butterflies Are Pretty … Gross!
This is a very good thing; it means they publish a lot of books about birds (probably more at this point than U.S. This is a hefty book, 560 pages long and dimensions of 6.3 The book’s organization reflects the authors’ goal of making this a guide accessible to birders of all levels and skill.
Because this book is nothing short of spectacular. The publisher of the Bird Families of the World describes it as a synopsis of the diversity of all birds in one volume: “…this volume distills the voluminous detail of the 17-volume Handbook of Birds of the World into a single book.”
Every bird book seems to be about the west coast this month!) I was not planning to do either, but I was going to Catalina Island with my daughter, Sarah, and her boyfriend, Todd, and the hour-long boat ride there and back sounded like an excellent opportunity to try this book out in the field. This is a small book, 56 pages long.
Every now and then you read a book which you believe should be read by everyone on the planet. Nature’s Best Hope by American entomologist and conservationist, Doug Tallamy, is such a book. The book is simply yet persuasively written, filled with scientific and historical evidence to make his case.
He brings to this book an academic background in biology and horticulture and, more importantly, decades of experience developing strategies for the best backyard bird feeding practices. The book is focused on suburban living, with little attention given to the unique challenges of urban bird feeding.
As a birder who struggles to hear and identify bird sound, this is the question continually on my mind as I write about this book. And, beyond the book itself, there is an audio component, a web site that allows you to play every spectrogram in the book. Yes, if you are going to use this book, you must read the Introduction!
It had perhaps 20 or so species per plate, and a rather concise description on the opposite (left) page, but all maps were grouped in the end of the book, making it very impractical to check them and in order to use the checklist, you had to know what to expect and which species are unlikely. The book covers all the world’s birds.
But, sometimes an appreciation of birds and birding requires more than a reference book with images of birds and facts about their identifying field marks. There are large avian handbooks and small ‘how-to bird’ guides, and quite a few excellent books of both types have been published.
And, if you want to understand what you have seen, whether the bird in your binocular field is a common everyday bird, or a common everyday bird never before seen in January, or a very unusual bird (like a Common Chaffinch), then you need this book, Birds of New Jersey: Status and Distribution , by William J.
Scientists were largely limited to studies birds in breeding colonies, at least those we knew about and that were accessible (and, if you think that’s a complete list, you haven’t read the news that came out this week about a new colony of Adélie penguins found in the Danger Islands, Antarctica). Technology to the rescue!
And a highly recommendable book it is, there is no doubt about it. The only issue is, checking the photos of it at the Princeton Nature website obscures the fact that this is rather thick and hefty book, not something one would consider a field guide (true, the publisher calls it an “identification” and not a “field” guide).
2020, all also published by Firefly); children’s books and books on bird feeding. 2020, all also published by Firefly); children’s books and books on bird feeding. This is an introductory guide, as are all the guides in the ABA series, and it is an excellent one. Bohemian Waxwing, p. 206, photo by Brian E.
Two books, two authors, two countries bursting with neotropical avian diversity. Since the books share authors and a creation process, I thought I would review them together. There is no reason expertise and talent cannot be shared across field guides when the books are published close together, like these are.
I have visited my local landfill for the last seven years, usually several times per winter, only to recently stumble upon a book called the Landfill! here and here ), Tim Dee devoted an entire book to it and I just had to read it. When I visited it, the Scole Inn had that kind of cozy, book-reading-by-the-fireplace feeling.
When was the last time you chose a book by its covers? This book is essentially about those birds that breed on the continent south of the Sahara, a topic few birders are familiar with. He has authored several other books and many articles, largely on natural history.
We recently got a review copy of a great new book called Shift Your Habit: Easy Ways to Save Money, Simplify Your Life, and Save the Planet , which is going to be available on March 9th. We really enjoyed the book a lot! The author, Elizabeth Rogers, is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Green Book.
White-tailed Tropicbird (Phaethon lepturus) Notwithstanding the fact that nearly all of the endemics and other native species are extinct the islands of St Helena and Ascension remain very popular for birdwatchers and especially photographers because they are both major breeding sites for seabirds. BirdLife international has designated St.
In the previous period I wrote mostly book reviews (but of some really great books ), yet I cannot remember when the last time was that I wrote of birding itself? A few Eurasian Tree Sparrows land by my car as I am scanning for Purple and Squacco Herons , Pygmy Cormorants and Black-necked Grebes in their brilliant breeding plumage.
Hornbills are fantastic birds that have fascinated me since I was able to leaf through the big and lavishly drawn Birds, their Life, their Ways, Their World , that was one of my favorite non-dinosaur (or so I thought at the time) books of my childhood (the other was the twin set mammals of the world by National Geographic). We can hope!
In that light, I am looking at this debut novel from the guy who got his MA in Creative Writing in 2010 — yesterday, in terms of the slow grind involved in publishing a book — and seeing the future, perhaps. Reviews book review Fiction turtles' “A man” here means Nathan Lochmueller.
If you’re a homebody who cherishes your quiet time, you most likely don’t want a talkative breed that requires constant exercise, for example. Although every dog is a unique individual, there are characteristics that are inherent in certain breeds which could help you find the right dog for your personality type.
Pu blishing papers, articles, and books on birds aside, Clive is also a keen bird photographer. Griffon Vultures have a long breeding season. Isn’t it a bit late to breed? Why bother with such a risky journey if you aren’t going to breed? The chicks need six months to develop so the adults lay their eggs in January.
But I insisted he try the blood and violence guy, and he humored me, only to send me, later, a longish email, pointing out the flaws in my judgment and in the book and the author, and closing with this: “Since I didn’t care for any of his characters, I really didn’t care who killed whom.”. Fair enough.
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