Category: Book Review
Peterson Field Guide To North American Bird Nests
Nests can be tricky to find, so discovering one is exciting like learning about a secret. Nests are also marvels of bird behavior. They are intricate, intimate, splendid, often ephemeral structures, and hold clues about how birds overcome challenges associated with reproduction. With wonderful photographs and succinct text, The Peterson Field Guide to North American Bird Nests captures this excitement of finding a nest and leaves readers in awe of the stunning diversity of nest morphologies seen in North American birds. Read More
Field Guide to the Birds of Chile
This review was made on the basis of an electronic copy, so some information was obtained from the publisher and seller web pages, or from collaborators who have it printed, to whom I thank. The Field Guide to the Birds of Chile describes 468 species (illustrated by one of the authors), including those recorded at least five times in the Chilean territory. This guide is a reworked edition of Spanish language texts by the same authors (Martínez & González 2004, 2017), where the most important change... Read More
Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay
In Woman, Watching Merilyn Simonds shares the true story of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a self-taught ornithologist who spent decades of her life studying the wild birds that she shared her northern Ontario home with. At first glance, prospective readers might think Woman, Watching is a book solely for bird enthusiasts. How wrong they’d be... Read More
The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism 1850-1920
As I read The Market in Birds, I found myself drawing Venn diagrams. I have multiple partially overlapped circles, trying to sort out the convergence zones of “hunters vs. conservationists” or “sportsmen vs. naturalists.” Some of my diagrams became complex puzzles, like the one sorting out how much overlap there might be between people who: like birds; like “nature”; like being outside; and like money... Read More
Birds of East Africa (Second Edition)
This is the second edition of this highly successful field guide. The first edition appeared in 2002 and was entitled Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa. There has also been a shift in publisher from T & AD Poyser to Helm Field Guides in the Bloomsbury Publishing stable. The guide covers Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. This hits rather a ‘sweet spot’ in terms of geographical coverage, with the other relevant major field guides covering either smaller or larger areas... Read More
Field Guide to the Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti
Hispaniola, the second largest island in the West Indies, provides habitat to 318 species of resident and migratory birds. This high species richness is related to the island’s diverse ecosystems and a complex geological history resulting from the merging of different land masses approximately 9 million years ago, as well as climatic changes in the Pleistocene that facilitated speciation. These events played a role in the evolution of 34 endemic species including six endemic genera... Read More
The Compact Australian Bird Guide
The first comprehensive guide to Australian birds was Neville Cayley’s (1931) What bird is that? The illustrations were rather poor by modern field guide standards and the text was limited, but the book became a best seller and was the only comprehensive guide available for several decades. More recently, several excellent field guides to Australian birds have been published, including the two-volume A Field Guide to Australian Birds by Peter Slater (1970, 1974), A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by... Read More
The origin and distribution of birds in coastal Alaska and British Columbia: the lost manuscript of ornithologist Harry S. Swarth
Harry Swarth (1878-1935) was a prolific ornithological explorer, curator, collector, and thinker. In 2019 his grandson Christopher found a manuscript that Swarth had completed shortly before his death. The unedited manuscript, which is based on over 1,000 days of rugged expeditions to southeast Alaska and adjacent British Columbia between 1909 and 1934, forms the core of this book. Read More
Field Guide to North American Flycatchers: Empidonax and Pewees
For many North American birders and ornithologists, the field identification of Empidonax flycatchers and their pewee cousins has long been one of the most difficult ID puzzles. Over the past six decades a range of top museum specialists, banders, and birders have spilled considerable ink on the subject in the scientific literature, field guides, and magazine articles, but this book is the first field guide to focus specifically on this often-perplexing group of flycatchers. Read More- 2 of 4
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