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 (2014–2016). 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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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 ...

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 ...

The Kestrel: Ecology, Behaviour and Conservation of an Open-land Predator

Author: David Costantini & Giacomo Dell'Omo

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Published: 2020

The Kestrel is probably not a book for those with a passing interest in kestrels, but would be a useful addition to the library of anyone who has a keen research interest in this widespread but ...

Pembrokeshire

Author: Jonathan Mullard

Publisher: William Collins, London

Published: 2020

Like the author, I too spent many a childhood holiday in Pembrokeshire. In those days the five hour drive from the mountains of Snowdonia to the Mediterranean-like coast of Pembrokeshire was well ...

Uplands and Birds

Author: Ian Newton

Publisher: William Collins, London

Published: 2020

Once again, Ian Newton has produced another brilliant book. As always, it is packed with facts and ideas presented in a clear and easy style that both grips one’s interest and deepens one’s ...

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 ...

Acoustic Ecology of European Bats: Species Identification, Study of their Habitats and Foraging Behaviour

Author: Michel Barataud (author), Yves Tupinier, Herman J.G.A. Limpens (contributors) & Anya Cockle-Betian (translator)

Publisher: BIOTOPE, Paris

Published: 2020

With developments in bat detectors, particularly passive detectors which are left outside to automatically trigger and record any bats that fly past, there is the potential to provide representative ...

Avifaunas, Atlases & Authors: a Personal View of Local Ornithology in the United Kingdom, from the Earliest Times to 2019

Author: David Ballance

Publisher: Calluna Books, Wareham

Published: 2020

As the title of this book suggests, it is a meta-book; a book about other books. Its main purpose is to inform the reader about works that deal, in various ways, with the element of place in ...
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