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It didn’t occur to me till I started reading The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird that there was also a possible threat to the eagle herself: poachers, who steal raptor eggs and chicks. 2019), and now this book. The book is structured cinematically. Author Joshua Hammer.
It was a pleasure to make these observations at the same time I was reading The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think , Jennifer Ackerman’s new book about the diversity and complexity of bird behavior. It’s fascinating stuff.
Producing a book about birds and nesting is a dangerous business. Some people love books like that. I’m happy to say that Laura Erickson and Marie Read have written a book, Into the Nest: Intimate Views of the Courting, Parenting, and Family Lives of Familiar Birds , that is not too cute and that does not anthropomorphize.
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. Should the gulls be controlled?
It’s a big subject that has been embraced by biologists Barbara Ballentine and Jeremy Hyman in Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication, a largish, book recently published by Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press. I do wish there was more about research on female bird song.
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).
The Secret Perfume of Birds: Uncovering the Science of Avian Scent focuses on this last question, but you might find yourself fascinated by the first two, which come early in the book but linger on in the imagination as author Danielle J. Whittaker’s research road is more serpentine than most academics. ” (p.
They may be about bird eggs ( The Most Perfect Thing: The Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg , 2016), or a 17th-century ornithologist ( Virtuoso by Nature: The Scientific Worlds of Francis Willughby, 2016), or How Bullfinches learn songs from humans ( The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology.
There is a long list of articles and books on how to feed birds in your yard. So, I was happy to see the publication of a book on all aspects of wild bird feeding—history, culture, and economics. It is a serious book with a friendly attitude. There was cleaning, lots of cleaning of feeders and yard. And squirrels.
Looking for a bird book that has appeal to cross the generations, one that will delight both the preschooler and the seasoned birder? Ignotofsky is best known for her 2016 book Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World, of which Scientific American noted “The world needs more books like this.”
An impressive combination of research and artwork, combined with a pragmatic organization aimed towards quick identification, and education, Baby Bird Identification extends the frontiers of bird identification guides and is an important contribution to wildlife rehabilitation literature. But perhaps that’s for a different book.
I love reading children’s books, even though my child is well over the age when she asks to have them read at bedtime and my nephews fall asleep all too easily after playing lacrosse all day. Here are three excellent but very different children’s books I enjoyed this year (two were published in 2013, one in 2011).
Or, Pygmy leaf-folding frogs, Afrixalus brachycnemis, from Tanzania, tiny climbing frogs who lay their eggs in leaves and then fold the leaves over them for protection, sealing the nest with secretions. This is what happens when you read a book like Frogs and Toads of the World , by Chris Mattison.
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.)
Perfect is a big word, and using it right in the title of your book invites close scrutiny. It is only that the philosophy behind this outlook deserves space that Birkhead does not — and probably could not, given everything else that is going on in this book — devote to it.
I remember I once read in a book – probably by an ornithologist – that he stated that he was going to write a postcard to his wife or girlfriend in order to “strengthen their pair bond” Sorry, forgot the exact source). A nice example of gender equality of sorts.
Where does the female Emperor Penguin go after she has produced that one egg and handed it over to the male for incubation? This is essentially a survey of ornithological marine research told in the voice of one of its most passionate and experienced participants. Technology to the rescue!
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
We received an email about a new book being released by Lantern Books. And why do so many people say the oppose the cruel practices of factory farming, yet still eat meat, eggs and dairy products? It's called "Change Of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change." In the author's words.
” According to this book, scops (?) Another strange aspect – already mentioned further up – is that these owls almost seem to be able to change their shape – from a round egg shape to a very prolonged branch-like shape. Camouflage at its best. Of course, the ear tufts are not really ears. But they look cool.
The breeding ecology of the Yellow-bellied Warbler was actually studied exactly here at Nonggang in 2019 by 3 Chinese researchers. Some Thai researchers looked at the breeding ecology of the Buff-breasted Babbler and published their findings in the somewhat unsuitable-sounding journal “Agriculture and Natural Resources”.
He published a number of books on birds of India and Burma, making me wonder how hard all these overseas civil servants really worked in their day jobs. Some like Charles Vaurie have considered it so unreliable that they even suggested the destruction of his egg collection.” ” ( source ).
Second they are reliant on Horseshoe Vetch on which they lay their eggs and on which the caterpillars feed. It was a fascinating story to follow and the happy ending made it all the more touching, but a tiny bit of extra research brought even more exciting details of the secret life of the ‘blue’ family. The male is on the left.
The opening beautifully encapsulates the essence of the book. This is the story of Fox’s experiences on board the Achiever, the research vessel of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. It’s a small group of 10 to 12 researchers and crew members, and Fox is the sole person responsible for the bird surveys.
He pairs conventional wisdom with actual research on such wisdom and speaks to experts who’ve been pondering the issues from the perspectives of their various disciplines. The research, much of the time, doesn’t support the conventional wisdom (which is not to say the case is closed on any issue). All day long.
Side note: Indeed, if you follow the titles of newly published books, you will see that there is a constant flow of “Reverse harem” publications. According to the HBW, when breeding, male birds do most of the incubation and parenting while females often leave the nest up to one week before the eggs hatch.
Taking inspiration from Matthiessen’s 1967 book (long out of print), which combined his natural history essays with species accounts by Ralph S. It is pointedly not an identification guide, though there is a lot of identification information in it, and it is not a coffee table book, though every page is illustrated.
Journeys With Penguins: Tracking the World’s Most Extreme Penguin is a different type of penguin book. It’s all about the improbable intersection of human beings and Emperor Penguins, and if I can’t make it to an Emperor Penguin colony (highly unlikely), reading this book has been the next best thing. Author Gerald L.
Bird Day is a lovely, little jewel of a book. Hauber and artist Tony Angell fulfills this goal beautifully and was the factor that motivated me to review this book. Hauber Hauber’s mini-essays focus on specific behaviors, enhanced by references to recent research yet written in a relaxed, personal way.
Once a body of research was established and the bird was declared endangered, it took many more years of experimentation, political maneuvering, conflicts with the National Guard, and some tragic fires to establish what is now acclaimed as a model conservation project. photo by Lynn C.
Steve, another member of our birding group, also had a field guide by Kenefick, Restall, and Hayes, but his was bordered in GREEN, had a slightly different title, and, to my extreme chagrin, was much more recent, showing the recently split Trinidad Motmot instead of the Blue-crowned Motmot on my book’s cover. I was confused.
trying to grasp the enormity of what had just happened, and reading this book, The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds by Daniel Lewis. Reading this book is, in addition to everything else, an exercise in getting to know the originals of many of our apostrophized birds.
Birders are always happy to see a turtle or tortoise, and there are times of the year when my social media feeds are sprinkled with photos of turtles beings removed from roads or crawling to land to lay eggs. Though this is a book written for non-scientists, some of this material may initially intimidate readers.
This shouldn’t have to be stated, especially in a book on bird evolution by an evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D. Futuyma is a synthesis of theory and research about evolution and birds. But, ‘synthesis’ is a dry word, and this is a book with a quiet yet firm personality underlying its words.
It’s a unique bird, even its scientific name is wonderful, so it’s not surprising that Gerard Gorman, Woodpecker Expert Supreme, has written a book all about the species. This is a very easy book to read. The latter is a nonmigratory, African endemic with a scattered, limited distribution. It’s an open question.
My knowledge of dinosaurs started and stopped with Jurassic Park (the movie, not the theme park), Patrick’s Dinosaurs, a charming book my daughter read in grade school, and, most recently, visits to the American Museum of Natural History with my nephews. These fossils are seen as proof that some dinosaurs brooded over its eggs.
A lot of this material is in her earlier book, Condors in Canyon Country, published by the Grand Canyon Association in 2007, now out-of-print (though available used). Well-researched and footnoted, these sections never feel disconnected from the more personal sections. My only wish is that the book included photographs.
One proposed explanation by the researchers for this phenomenon is that similar-looking birds reduce their risk of predation, as predators find it more difficult to focus on and isolate a single target. He also wrote some books on Burma, one of which (“A Civil Servant in Burma”) Wikipedia calls a classic.
The Pough & Eckelberry guides (add in artist Earl L Poole who did black-and-white drawings for the later titles) were notable for Pough’s discursive text and Eckelberry’s lovely painted portraits, and many older birders have stories about how they were inspired by these books. This is a fairly large book: 907 pages; 7.38
from University of Miami in 1966 and has written over 75 scientific and popular papers and books, including Shorebirds of North America: The Photographic Guide. Retirement apparently means writing this book and its companion volume, Dragonflies and Damselflies of the West (published by Princeton Univ. More on this later.)
It isn’t in your book of seabirds? (It But, to Elizabeth Gehrman, the author of Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man who Brought it Back from Extinction, and to David Wingate, the man who Gehrman profiles in this excellent book, the Bermuda Petrel is always the cahow. You’ve never heard of the cahow?
Three books will have been published about the Passenger Pigeon by the end of 2014: A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction by Joel Greenberg, The Passenger Pigeon by Errol Fuller, and A Message From Martha: The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and Its Relevance Today by Mark Avery.
The island is teeming with so many birds that their eggs and young chicks were once harvested for food. We had the foresight to book the Three Islands Seabird Seafari in advance, a thrilling journey where we would see the seabirds around Lamb, Craigleith, and Bass Rock from a small inflatable boat.
Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary was an amazing and unexpected treat, but that’s because I failed to do my research. It’s only 15 minutes north of High Island, though in neighboring Chambers County (High Island is part of Galveston County, good to know if you’re going to be researching eBird checklists).
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