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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Britain's Day-Flying Moths: a Field Guide to the Day-flying Moths of Great Britain and Ireland

Author: David Newland, Robert Still & Andy Swash

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

Published: 2019

Mention of a day-flying moth to many people will receive a reaction akin to ‘Don’t you mean a butterfly?’ However, as mentioned in WildGuide’s Britain’s Day-flying Moths the number of moth species ...

Birds of Bhutan and the Eastern Himalayas

Author: Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp, Tim Inskipp & Sherub

Publisher: Helm, London

Published: 2019

The original Birds of Bhutan published by Helm in 1999 was the first field guide to the avifauna of this Himalayan nation; the new work however, is not simply just a second edition but has been ...

Wildlife Disease Ecology: Linking Theory to Data and Application

Author: Kenneth Wilson, Andy Fenton & Dan Tompkins (eds.)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Published: 2019

Zoonotic diseases (those that infect humans but which originate in populations of wild animals), especially novel ones, sometimes receive quite high profile, e.g. avian influenza, Ebola and, more ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Rebirding: Restoring Britain's Birds

Author: Benedict Macdonald

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing, Exeter

Published: 2019

One of the few personal joys of these recent challenging months is that I’ve had the time to read many nature books. Some of which have been thrilling reads, and today I thought I would share my ...

The Ascent of Birds: How Modern Science is Revealing their Story

Author: John Reilly

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing, Exeter

Published: 2018

If, like me, you are continually perplexed by the seemingly random re-ordering of birds on the British List every year, then this is the book for you. Any list of species needs to be ordered in some ...
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