WILDGuides, a British publishing company, had a problem. They wanted to put together a book about The World’s Rarest Birds, but were finding that it was pretty difficult locating photographs of the 590 bird species considered Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered or Endangered. The solution? Hold not one, but two international photo contests, one in 2010 and one in 2012. The winners of the 2012 The World’s Rarest Birds International Photo Competition were announced April 3rd. The winner in the Critically Endangered category is Dubi Shapiro, who took this photograph of a displaying White-bellied Cinclodes, a species found only in a small area in the Peruvian Andes. BirdLife International estimates its current population at 70-400 individuals.

The World’s Rarest Birds aims to promote awareness of the fragility of existence of these birds and to support BirdLife International’s Preventing Extinction Programme. You can see a slide show of the winning photographs of these endangered birds on the Princeton University Press Blog. 10000 Birds will be reviewing the book, available from Princeton University Press in the United States, in the near future.

photograph used courtesy of Princeton University Press

Written by Donna
Having been attached to books all her life, Donna Lynn Schulman is thrilled to be engaged in a passion that requires fealty to an information artifact called a “field guide.” Donna divides her birding time between Queens, New York, where she grew up, and central New Jersey, where she is on the adjunct faculty of a very large public university. Donna was a Library Journal book reviewer for 15 years, reviewing over 100 titles, and has also reviewed labor relations books and contributed articles on labor relations research to specialized journals and monographs. She wrote her first birding book reviews for the Queens County Bird Club’s News & Notes, which she formerly edited, and has also reviewed for the American Birding Associations' Birding magazine. Donna was recently pleased to talk about the top birding books of 2017 with Nate Swick for the ABA December podcast. When she is not birding or working on her nature photography, Donna travels to Florida, where she attempts to turn her young nephews into birders (so far, they are fisherman who send her photos of birds), to Los Angeles to visit her writer daughter and son-in-law, or somewhere wonderfully new and birdy. She also contemplates someday writing an article for her blog, Queensgirl.