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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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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Norfolk Plover: A Study of the Stone-curlew

Author: Chris Knights

Publisher: Wild Breckland Books

Published: 2023

Back in 2002, one of my first jobs in conservation was being part of a four-person RSPB team that monitored and protected the nests of Stone-curlews in the Breckland area of Norfolk, and my love of ...

Be a Birder: The Joy of Birdwatching and How to Get Started

Author: Hamza Yassin

Publisher: Gaia Books

Published: 2023

Hamza Yassin is well-known for his work as a wildlife cameraman and presenter. He has worked on a whole host of television programmes, including David Attenborough’s Wild Isles, and has presented his ...

Haunted by the last tide: The SWLA in the Danish Wadden Sea

Author: Colin Williams (text) & Marco Brodde (editor)

Publisher: Society of Wildlife Artists, London

Published: 2023

The result of two two-week trips by 19 artists, all members of the Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA), this beautiful book documents the birds and landscapes of Denmark’s Waden Sea National Park. ...

The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife: Britain and Ireland between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution

Author: Lee Raye

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing, London

Published: 2023

As the title suggests, this book is presented as an atlas of the wildlife on our ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ from roughly 1519 to 1772. The term ‘wildlife’ covers a range of vertebrate species (from ...

RSPB How to Photograph Garden Birds

Author: Mark Carwardine

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, London

Published: 2023

During my 20 years of birding, I have only modestly dabbled in bird photography (with the same camera from the 2000s I’ve had since school), so when beginning to read this new RSPB book by Mark ...
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