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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Birdsplaining: A Natural History

Author: Jasmine Donahaye

Publisher: New Welsh Review, Aberystwyth

Published: 2023

The author herself acknowledges in her opening note that some offence may be taken by the title, but Jasmine Donahaye’s collection of short essays is much more than it first seems. She elucidates a ...

At the Very End of the Road

Author: Phillip J Edwards

Publisher: Whittles Publishing, Dunbeath

Published: 2021

This book takes you through a year on the author, Phillip Edward’s, home ‘patch’ – a complex area of farmland, saltmarsh, river and coastline. Each chapter covers a calendar month, describing in ...

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

Author: Christian Cooper

Publisher: Penguin Random House, New York

Published: 2023

2nd place in Best Bird Book of the Year 2023When starting Better Living Through Birding, I was not sure what to expect. Cooper is perhaps most widely known in the UK for the infamous incident in ...

Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds

Author: Conor Mark Jameson

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing, London

Published: 2023

Of American parentage, William Henry Hudson was born in Argentina in 1841. Arriving in London in 1874, he struggled for some years to make ends meet, before making his name as a naturalist. Hudson is ...

Robin

Author: Helen F Wilson

Publisher: Reaktion Books, London

Published: 2022

As part of the Reaktion books’ ‘Animal’ series, Helen F Wilson brings together the various ways that Robins have permeated our culture, whether in books, folk stories, newspaper stories, adverts or ...

A haven for farmland birds: the unexpected treasures of a small patch of arable land in the Cambridge green belt

Author: John Meed

Publisher: Independent Publishing Network

Published: 2022

John Meed’s succinct capsule of the relationship between farmland bird abundance, behaviour, breeding success, and land management on a small patch of East Anglian farmland encompasses so much more ...

Flight Paths: How the Mystery of Bird Migration Was Solved

Author: Rebecca Heisman

Publisher: Swift Press, London

Published: 2023

This fascinating book opens with a question: where do the birds go? People have, of course, been asking this question for centuries, and over time our knowledge has increased enormously and, indeed, ...

RSPB Pocket Guide to British Birds

Author: Marianne Taylor

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Published: 2022

This book may be small but packs quite a punch – more than 300 species of bird are covered. Each species account gives you illustrations (especially good for waders where the images used highlight key ...

RSPB Handbook of Garden Wildlife

Author: Peter Holden & Geoffrey Abbott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, London

Published: 2023

Gardens cumulatively make up a huge habitat in the UK and for those of us lucky enough to have a garden they have the potential to host all sorts of amazing wildlife. This book is a remarkably ...
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