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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The Birds of Spurn

Author: Andy Roadhouse

Publisher: The Spurn Bird Observatory Trust

Published: 2016

As I sit at home writing this review, the Spurn Migration Festival is in full flow. BTO’s Andy Clements is there and news has just emerged that he has just found a Kentish Plover! This coastal species ...

Multimedia Identification Guide to North Atlantic Seabirds: Albatrosses and Fulmarine Petrels

Author: Bob Flood, Ashley Fisher & illustrations by John Gale

Publisher: Pelagic Birds & Birding Multimedia Identification Guides (in association with Scilly Pelagics)

Published: 2016

The back cover pretty much says it all – over 270 pages of detailed and original text. Over 200 colour photographs. Over 180 stunning and accurate illustrations. Large format colour range maps based ...

Charles Darwin's Life with Birds: His Complete Ornithology

Author: Clifford B Frith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

There are numerous titles ending in ‘ist’ that could be used to describe Charles Darwin; as Clifford Frith notes, he was a ‘biologist, zoologist, entomologist, botanist, geologist, volcanologist, ...

Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago: Greater Sundas and Wallacea

Author: James A Eaton, Bas van Balen, Nick W Brickle & Frank E Rheindt

Publisher: Lynx Edicions, Barcelona

Published: 2016

I visited Sumatra last year, armed with a fairly dated “A field guide to the birds of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali” by MacKinnon and Phillipps, and although I did get by with this guide, I felt an ...

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg

Author: Tim Birkhead

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, London

Published: 2016

This book, like others by Tim Birkhead, is a journey through the history of a particular field of scientific exploration: in this case, the biology of eggs. Engagingly written and extensively ...

Woodland Bird Songs & Calls

Author: Jannes Hannu & Owen Roberts

Publisher: New Holland, London

Published: 2013

As with the previous title this book would be useful as a guide to learning woodland bird songs and calls, and covers an extensive range of species but, once again, it contains many species never ...

Wetland Bird Songs & Calls

Author: Jannes Hannu & Owen Roberts

Publisher: New Holland, London

Published: 2013

At first glance, an elegant little book to help you get the hang of wetland bird sounds – a small book, with helpful descriptions and an accompanying CD. However, (and I feel this is a big ...

Helm Field Guides: Birds of the United Arab Emirates

Author: Simon Aspinall & Richard Porter

Publisher: Christopher Helm, London

Published: 2011

The birds of the Middle East hold a particular attraction to many UK birders, with familiar species cheek-by-jowl with others that occur only as vagrants to our shores. One of the easiest countries to ...

Effects of Climate Change on Birds

Author: Peter O Dunn(Editor) & Anders Pape Møller(Editor)

Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford

Published: 2010

Since the publication of the first edition of this edited volume 10 years ago, we have all grown in our awareness of the twin biodiversity and climate crises that the planet faces. There is building ...
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