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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Gulls

Author: John C. Coulson

Publisher: William Collins, London

Published: 2019

Gulls is a weighty addition to the New Naturalist series, with almost 500 densely-worded pages (including appendices and indices). This is not entirely surprising, given the lengthy research career of ...

Birds of the UK Overseas Territories

Author: Roger Riddington(Editor) & Miranda Krestovnikoff(Foreword By)

Publisher: Poyser, London

Published: 2020

Readers of British Birds will most likely be familiar with much of the content of this new publication from Poyser, which brings together 13 papers published over the past 12 years, each describing ...

Rostherne Mere: Birds of Mere and Margin: One Hundred and Thirty Years of Observations

Author: Steve Barber, Bill Bellamy and Tom Wall; with Ray Scally (illus.)

Publisher: Tom Wall (privately published)

Published: 2019

This book is a nice local avifauna of the famous Rostherne Mere National Nature Reserve in north Cheshire. But if the word ‘avifauna’ makes readers think of their standard format – a dry catalogue of ...

Rostherne Mere: Aspects of a Wetland Nature Reserve: Wildlife, Science and People Through Time

Author: Tom Wall and Gisèle Wall (eds.)

Publisher: Tom Wall (privately published)

Published: 2019

In 1912, the grandly-named Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves for Britain and the Empire, fore-runner of The Wildlife Trusts, started to compile a list of 284 potential reserves in the ...

Birds of the West Indies

Author: Herbert A. Raffaele, James W. Wiley, Orlando H. Garrido, Allan R. Keith & Janis Raffaele

Publisher: Helm, London

Published: 2020

Having observed last year when reviewing the excellent new Lynx Edicions Birds of the West Indies following a recent trip to the region, that all the available bird guides at that time appeared to be ...

The Pelagic Dictionary of Natural History of the British Isles

Author: Peter J. Jarvis

Publisher: Pelagic Press, Exeter

Published: 2021

This impressive compendium sits somewhere between dictionary and encyclopedia, providing information for 10,000 species of animals, plants, fungi and algae of the British Isles. Detailed descriptions ...

The Birds of Nottinghamshire

Author: Jason Reece, Nick Crouch, David Parkin, Chris du Feu & Bernie Ellis

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, Liverpool

Published: 2019

It is 44 years since the last review of the county’s birds and much has changed since then. I’m not sure back then anyone would have predicted Little Egret breeding in the county. The book follows a ...

Britain's Birds: an Identification Guide to the Birds of Great Britain and Ireland

Author: Rob Hume, Robert Still, Andy Swash, Hugh Harrop & David Tipling

Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) & Oxford

Published: 2020

This bird ID guide covers 631 species and includes birds recorded in Britain and Ireland. It is incredibly comprehensive and has a plentiful amount of glossy, detailed photographs which show all the ...

Emma Turner : a life looking at birds

Author: James Parry & Jeremy Greenwood

Publisher: Norfolk & Norwich Naturalists' Society, Norwich

Published: 2020

Emma Turner was a pioneer: one of the early bird ringers; one of the early bird photographers; one of the first 15 woman fellows of the Linnean Society (January 1905) and one of the first four female ...
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