Book reviews

Book reviews

Read reviews of the books we hold in the Chris Mead Library, written by our in-house experts. A selection of book reviews also features in our members’ magazine, BTO News.

Featured review

All the Birds of the World

Lynx have had a long-term project to produce an exhaustive guide to the birds of the world. It started out with the 17 volumes of the Handbook of the Birds of the World (1992-2013) which has family and species accounts for all birds. This was followed by the two volumes of the Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World (2014-16). They have now published the third and final stage of this avian odyssey with this current book.

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All the Birds of the World

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The Biology of Moult in Birds

Author: Lukas Jenni & Raffael Winkler

Publisher: Helm, London

Published: 2020

Moult is a fascinating basic life history event in birds which, despite its major impact on their life cycle, is relatively poorly understood and even neglected. This is a companion to the excellent ...

Woodland Flowers: Colourful Past, Uncertain Future

Author: Keith Kirby

Publisher: Bloomsbury, London

Published: 2020

This is a book for anyone curious about the lives of our woodland plants, and the processes and pressures that affect them. Keith Kirby’s career as a woodland ecologist gave him vast experience of ...

The Ring Ouzel: a View from the North York Moors

Author: Vic Fairbrother, Ken Hutchinson, Jonathan Pomroy (Illustrator) & Chris Rollie (Fwd)

Publisher: Whittles Publishing, Dunbeath

Published: 2020

In my career as a field ornithologist, I would rate one of the best projects I ever worked on as the season I spent assisting on the long-running Ring Ouzel (Turdus torquatus) monitoring project at ...

Hats: a Very UNnatural History

Author: Malcolm Smith

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, Michigan

Published: 2020

The vivid plumage used on the hat on the cover of this book is a reminder of the main reason birds are featured in a book on hats. Covering the history of hats from their earliest evidence at the end ...

Farming with Nature: Promoting Biodiversity Across Europe Through Partridge Conservation

Author: Jen Brewin, Francis Buner & Julie Ewald

Publisher: Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Fordingbridge

Published: 2020

This book sets out an approach for successfully combining a viable farming business with increasing biodiversity and other public goods. It draws on scientific research and demonstration projects from ...

A Bird a Day

Author: Dominic Couzens

Publisher: Batsford, London

Published: 2020

This is a beautifully illustrated and very enjoyable book by well-known author and naturalist Dominic Couzens. The title says it all - the book goes through a calendar year showcasing 366 (it accounts ...

Britain's Habitats: a Field Guide to the Wildlife Habitats of Great Britain and Ireland

Author: Sophie Lake, Durwyn Liley, Robert Still & Andy Swash

Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford

Published: 2020

To understand the distribution of our birds it very much helps if we know the preferred habitats of each species. For example, Knot winter on mudflats, Dartford Warblers live on lowland heaths and ...

Lincolnshire Bird Atlas 1980-1999

Author: Lincolnshire Bird Club

Publisher: Lincolnshire Bird Club

Published: 2020

Published soon after the series of local atlases that coincided with Bird Atlas 2007–11, you might think the Lincolnshire Bird Atlas would span a similar period. You might expect a lavishly ...

My Birding Life

Author: Moss Taylor

Publisher: Wren Publishing, Sheringham

Published: 2020

Ask any birder or naturalist that lives in Norfolk if they know the name Moss Taylor and invariably, they will say "yes", and I suspect the majority will have met him too, and of these many know him ...
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