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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. Do birds use odors and a sense of smell to communicate with each other? ” (p.
Doug Futuyma believes in science and in the scientific basis of evolution. This shouldn’t have to be stated, especially in a book on bird evolution by an evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D. How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity by Douglas J.
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. I do have some minor criticisms, and these are what you may call procedural.
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.
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.
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.
Bird communication is a complex and evolving science. 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.
And ten years later, I found my name among the data providers in this magnificent book – possibly the most important ornithological publication in Europe in the 21st century, so far. This book has an imposing presence on every desk: a 24 × 31 cm / 9.4 Original artwork illustrates all species with a full account.
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 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.
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. And, it is not a coffee table book, though it is on the large size (11 x 8.5) It is pretty amazing how much information Mike Unwin compresses into the book’s 144 pages.
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.
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. Colonialism and appropriation of knowledge is discussed in Chapter 6, The New World of Science.
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.
His latest book is The Real James Bond , available as a hardcover, an eBook and an audiobook. He noted that this new bird had longer bills and “darker loral and auricular regions” than the mainland Brown-headed Nuthatch, and collected two of them for science. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
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. It’s challenging reading.
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.
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.
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. The essays also touch on conservation, though less that the amount I would have assumed would be in a book that is part of an “Earth Day” series.
Aficionados of natural history writing should recognise the author as that of the Song of the Dodo , the popular sciencebook about biogeography and conservation that to me rates as one the finest popular sciencebooks ever written. The book is about zoonoses, diseases that jump from animals to people.
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 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.
” 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. This is more than eBird reports–a checklist generated from the citizen science database lists only 1,413 species.
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.
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).”
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). 49-50) She is also adept at writing about conservation’s larger context in terms of its history, public policy struggles, and the science behind species re-introduction.
Jim Wright’s latest book is The Real James Bond , the biography of the ornithologist whose name Ian Fleming stole for his secret agent 007. He writes “The Bird Watcher” column for the USA today newspapers in N.J. He is a deputy Marsh Warden for the Celery Farm Natural Area in Allendale, N.J.
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!”
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.
It’s a sign, I think, when I receive a book to review and realize I just bought the same book, on my own recognizance, for my own pleasure. Also a sign when I spot other books by the same author on the shelf in the office of a member of my thesis committee, and on my own Christmas wish list. This is a good book.
Recently, I’ve reviewed a number of well-designed and interesting books on birds. As I read, I realized that I had encountered books very much like this before. But not, mind you, on any shelf of popular science or ornithological memoir. People who are into birds.
How to Be a Better Birder is a very different kind of birding book, and, once you think about it, the perfect book to be written at this particular moment in the birding universe. He writes about how experienced birders think, and how they draw on the sciences of weather, geography, and ecology to analyze where the birds will be.
If you want to know why most scientists support collecting this piece in Science explains it better than I can. I can understand why some people are conflicted, but the value to science of the collections is immense. Their original and crucial function is being lost as museums struggle to balance the books and keep the punters amused.
It is something mystical, something holy, and most relevantly for this book, something that you quest for. More and more often, I am seeing books in which birds are the magic rings, the elusive objects that control the fates of characters and, at least on a symbolic level, the fates of whole worlds. Something worthy of epic.
Guiding aside, Howell is a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences and the author of many books, including Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America (Princeton). and I am glad to see this bold move in this book.
The theft of some “dead birds” captures his imagination, and by the end of the book we’ve traveled with him around the world as he talks to famous fly tiers,* the Tring police, and Rist himself, seeking for the truth behind the story. Seriously, this book is crying out for a movie treatment!). Frustrated with the U.S.
He described the Brewer’s Blackbird for science more than a decade before Audubon. Thomas Mayo Brewer was younger than Audubon but less iternant, spending all his life in Boston. In the long run, all of this proved to signify nothing, as the sparrows were more than able to take care of themselves.
My aunt Greet gave me a book in 1975 that featured the 60 most endangered birds in Europe. In the book, one picture stood out in particular: the White-headed Duck. For lack of better pictures that was the one that got used in the book (out of print – ISBN 90 274 8348 5). Buy the book and take a week!
It takes a skilled hand to make the characters and threads equally compelling, and if they are not, the book feels unbalanced. So I will only say that it made me infavorably disposed towards the book, and you can draw your own conclusions. This is a book that people come to for the plot and the science. But what of that?
For those who can't handle the visuals, now it's available as an audio book. Earthlings is a feature-length documentary about how dependent human beings are on animals, primarily in five key areas: pets, food, clothing, entertainment and science. It's supposed to be so intense, it turns people into vegans (Ellen DeGeneres for one.)
We received an email about a new book being released by Lantern Books. Change Of Heart provides science-based answers to many questions that are hotly debated among animal activists. Rory Freedman, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Skinny Bitch, proclaims “If you want to create a better world, read this book!”
The single greatest challenge facing any book of science writing is balance. Otherwise, there would be no science writing, everyone would just go straight to the journals. Pinyon Jay by Dave Menke of the US FWS. This Pinyon Jay knows what you did last summer, at least when it comes to stealing pine nuts.
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, each essay tells a story.
The task of wrestling this topic down into something that the human mind can manage, without losing sight of the big picture because it’s snowing in Buffalo, is likely to be the task of a lifetime for many science communicators. On the whole, if you consider yourself one of the above, you should consider adding this book to your shelf.
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