This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
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. Yet, the research projects are never the whole story. It’s fascinating stuff.
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.
It’s a decidedly different direction for the author of Kingbird Highway (1997), Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America (2005), and A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration (2019), to cite just three of his books, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed, underlined with energy, and am still thinking about.
I wish I had read this book. The book was originally published in 2006 as Galápagos: A Natural History with John Kricher as the sole author. Kricher is well-known in naturalist book circles as a scientist who can write about complex scientific topics in engaging smart prose touched with just the right amount of dry wit.
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.
This, 2022, has been a curious year for books about birds and birding. Despite the absence of two major publishers—Lynx and HMH–from the new title publishing scene (hopefully not permanently), we were happily surprised to read and peruse many excellent books. But this is more than a coffee table book. Highly recommended.
This added layer elevates Birding Under the Influence: Cycling Across America in Search of Birds and Recovery from a book of fun birding and travel adventures to a more complex memoir about the ways in which birding spurs self-reflection, motivates life change, feeds a need for wonder, and creates community. This is a smartly written book.
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).
It’s the subject of the eleventh essay in this collection, almost smack in the middle of the 22 pieces that comprise the book. and then the life and writings of Harriet Mann Miller, a New York State native who under the name Olive Thorne Miller wrote eleven books and hundreds of articles about nature in the mid- and late 19th century.
This is the book you will want to give to everyone in your life who has said ‘I’d like to bird too, but ….(fill Not only is Nate a birding and blogging colleague, but Mike Bergin, 10,000 Birds co-publisher, has written the Foreword and I have been threatened with all sorts of birder-type punishment if I give this book a bad review.
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.
Flight Paths is a splendid but risky title for a book about bird migration. It could easily be mistaken for a book about aviation or space navigation or even a flight simulator game if you don’t read the long, adjective-filled subtitle: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration.
Birding being a visual and an auditory pursuit, it’s not surprising that publishers have taken advantage of the media of its day to produce bird books accompanied by CDs or DVDs. QR stands for Quick Response (the things I learn when I write a book review!). The process itself was easier to use than playing a DVD while reading a book.
One of the reasons I enjoy about reviewing books is the opportunity to read titles I wouldn’t ordinarily encounter, not because they aren’t good but because they don’t fall easily into a category. Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record by Errol Fuller is one of these books. I understand why Fuller created this book.
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.
Fortunately, with a prescience that’s a little scary, David Allen Sibley has created a book perfect for beginning birders (and the rest of us): What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing–What Birds Are Doing, and Why. copyright @2020 by David A llen Sibley. copyright @2020 by David A llen Sibley.
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).
Be warned, The Atlas of Birds is not a map book, though it does contain maps, lovely orange and purple and green bird distribution maps. It is not an encyclopedia, though it does summarize research, explain basic concepts, and ends with a section on bird statistics. Isabelle Lewis and Corinne Pearlman designed the book, with Ms.
The book is chiefly about how people have conceptualized and studied birds, but there is an underlying theme, the changing ways in which our Western culture has viewed animals, nature and God. It’s a huge scope for a 338-page book. Common Guillemot research at Skomer Island, Wales.
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.
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.
For endangered species, red and gray tabs at the top of the page indicate level of threatened status from the IUCN and the Libro Rogo de los Vertebrados Cubanos (Red Data Book for Cuban Vertebrates). The book includes lots of space for Notes. This means that it has some interesting features, which may or may not work in practice.
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.
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.
This is the charm of Lima’s book. The book focuses on two listing events: her 2012 Louisiana Big Year and her 2016 Louisiana 300 Year. The book is structured in a way that made much more sense after I read it than as I was reading it. But, in Chapter Three the book takes on more shape. ” I wondered.
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.
In six or seven months, the “best books of the year” features will come out in the important print and web publications. A few people share parts of this story and this book with the author – Ph.D. candidates and other seabird field researchers; and crusty boatsmen, some clued-in and some clueless, who guide him in various latitudes.
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.
They’re useful resources for researching bird food sources (present and historical), relative numbers of small mammals in a bird’s prey area, and seed dispersal. And they’re a great… Source
” The book in question is Birds of Bolivia: Field Guide , edited and written by Sebastian K. The guide covers 1,433 species, the number of birds documented at the end of 2014, the cutoff point for the book. The downside of the size (and quality of paper) is that this is a fairly heavy book, about 2.5
The accounts vary in length from two to six pages, and are well illustrated with photographic images by Ryan Phillips of the Belize Raptor Research Institute and a group of 40 photographers from the United States and Central America. The book’s bio is not exaggerating when it says that author William S.
Karlson and Dale Rosselet in Birding by Impression: A Different Approach to Knowing and Identifying Birds, the latest addition to the Peterson Reference Guide series and a book likely to revive the continuing discussion about the merits of GISS (the term used in the book, as opposed to the popular jizz ) versus traditional bird identification.
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. Authors George L.
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.
This is what happens when you read a book like Frogs and Toads of the World , by Chris Mattison. A book about all the frogs and toads of the world is an ambitious undertaking. This seemingly boundless diversity comes through in every chapter of this book, and is both its strength and its weakness. And, they look like frogs.
It’s never too late or too early to buy a children’s book about birds. It’s been a few years since my last roundup of children’s bird books, and children’s book writers, illustrators and publishers continue to produce picture books that feature avian protagonists. First, the board books.
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.
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.
Everyone is looking back on their best birds of 2019, so I thought it would be a good idea to look at a book that looks back a little further: Urban Ornithology: 150 Years of Birds in New York City , by P. Because, as this book demonstrates so well, it is sometimes important to look back in order to move forward. “Wait!”
That sentence really doesn’t begin to describe this very smart and highly readable book. The ‘little green book’ was now over 450 pages long! Photographic credits are given with each photo, which I like better than a listing at the back of the book. Press, 2011). Please–do not read this section only!
It’s time for some short book reviews. Two books are part of series I’ve reviewed previously (and you may want to reread those posts for more detailed info), one is a handbook that I’ve been wanting to review for a long time, but thought that a shorter piece would work better than the long ones I always seem to end up doing here.
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.)
Two reactions on receiving my review copy from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: (1) Small book, colorful design, (2) There really are 12 steps and they are not in the order I expected. Especially 10, because, this being a book co-authored by Steve Howell, plumage quickly becomes a tutorial on molt. Howell and Brian L. 16, below).”
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 30+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content