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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Galapagos Crusoes: A Year Alone with the Birds

Author: Bryan Nelson & June Nelson

Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides, Chalfont St Peter

Published: 2022

Galapagos Crusoes: A Year Alone with the Birds is an update to Bryan Nelson’s original 1968 book Galapagos: Islands of Birds, with additional stories from June, his wife. The two of them spent a year ...

Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation

Author: Tim R Birkhead

Publisher: Viking Books, London

Published: 2022

The scope of Birds and Us is impressive, beginning 8,000 years ago with Neolithic cave art and ending on a 2018 undergraduate trip to Bempton Cliffs. As BTO Vice-president Prof Tim Birkhead takes us ...

Birds of the Middle East: A Photographic Guide

Author: Abdulrahman Al-Sirhan, Jens Eriksen & Richard Porter

Publisher: Helm, London

Published: 2022

The Middle East is something of an international stepping stone for both migratory birds and people travelling between Europe, Africa and Asia. For birdwatchers stopping over in this part of the world ...

Birds of South Africa

Author: Adam Riley

Publisher: Helm, London

Published: 2022

For budding birders or those unfamiliar with African avifauna, the prospect of identifying birds in a biodiversity-rich country like South Africa might feel overwhelming. Birds of South Africa aims to ...

Birds of the Lesser Antilles: A Photographic Guide

Author: Ryan Chenery

Publisher: Helm, London

Published: 2022

This guide serves as a colourful who’s who of the Lesser Antilles’ birdlife designed for casual birders visiting the region, including those on a non-birding holiday who would nonetheless appreciate ...

The Bird Name Book

Author: Susan Myers

Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford

Published: 2022

In style, this very engaging book sits somewhere between the terse Helm dictionary of scientific bird names (by James Jobling) and Ray Reedman’s much more discursive Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks. ...

The Role of Birds in World War One: How Ornithology Helped to Win the Great War

Author: Nicholas Milton

Publisher: Pen & Sword History, Barnsley

Published: 2022

In a follow-up to last year’s The Role of Birds in World War Two: How Ornithology Helped to Win the War, Nicholas Milton has produced another fascinating book exploring the role played by birds in ...

The Corncrake: an ecology of an enigma

Author: Frank Rennie

Publisher: Whittles Publishing, Dunbeath

Published: 2022

This comprehensive monograph is, perhaps surprisingly, the first to be published on this charismatic species. Extremely well referenced, while still being highly readable, Frank Rennie’s book provides ...

Low-carbon birding

Author: Javier Caletrío

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing

Published: 2022

As Javier Caletrío notes at the very beginning of his introduction to this collection of essays, ‘There is a beauty in the simplicity of birdwatching’. This simplicity is something that has all too ...
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