
This, 2022, has been a curious year for books about birds and birding. Despite the absence of two major publishers—Lynx and HMH–from the new title publishing scene (hopefully not permanently), we were happily surprised to read and peruse many excellent books. There was no overriding subject trend, as we’ve seen in recent years, rather a diversity of topics and approaches. Here are ten titles (it could have been more) selected for their uniqueness, excellence in writing and research, and giftability.
Our reviewers are Donna, Dragan, and Mark: their fuller bios appear after their full reviews, which are linked to the summaries, below. (Other links are to the publishers’ sites.)
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[Mark]: This luscious book, Penguins: The Ultimate Guide, by De Roy, Jones, and Cornthwaite, is the second edition of a book first published in 2015. Fifty pages have been updated with new text or photos, but what Donna said, in her review of the first edition, is still apt: the photographs are “amongst the most stunning I’ve ever seen.” But this is more than a coffee table book. There is a wealth of information about these marvelous creatures, given via prose essays, and charts, and tables – it’s all quite user-friendly. What extraordinary birds penguins are: physically, they remind us of ourselves, so we think we understand their behaviors, but, as the authors say, “their private life is as complex and mysterious as that of any wild animal.” Anything else we could say about this great book would only be more in the way of superlatives. (And the price has not increased since 2015; it’s a bargain.)
[Dragan]: Europe’s Birds: An Identification Guide, by Hume, Still, Swash, and Harrop is a photographic guide. If you are a newbie, that will likely be perfectly acceptable, but being old school myself, I still prefer paintings. For example, many photos are shot in poor light, obscuring the true colours. Others are shot in too bright sunlight washing out the colours of the upperparts and shading the underparts. Can you believe me when I say that I haven’t noticed any of it in this book? The artwork of “Europe’s Birds” is dazzling, the text condensed and comprehensive, and the layout and design are without peer. Highly recommended.
[Donna]: The Bird Name Book by Susan Myers may not be the first book written about bird names but it’s doubtless the most comprehensively researched and beautifully packaged. Myers, a professional birding guide in “real life,” summarizes the etymology and history of all common bird names (of bird families and groups, not all 10,000-plus species). You don’t need to be a linguist to delight in the diversity and sometimes unexpectedness of these name origins. Myers lavishly quotes from original sources and has illustrated the book with both historical photos and her own images.
[Dragan]: The best birding in Asia is not even on the Asian mainland! However, amongst the 200 species birdable in two weeks, in Sabah you stand a chance of seeing more than 70 endemic and near-endemic birds, together with an array of pheasants, frogmouths, trogons, pittas, thrushes, and two of the most recently described birds in the world, Spectacled Flowerpecker and Cream-eyed Bulbul, both named to science only in 2019. And the very best and the most up-to-date field guide is Birds of Malaysia – Covering Peninsular Malaysia, Malaysian Borneo and Singapore”, the 2020 Lynx and BirdLife International Collection guide by Chong Leong Puan, Geoffrey Davison and Kim Chye Lim. The place for such bold claims is usually at the end of a review, but just as well, in case you are too lazy to read the entire text, I may start with it.
[Donna]: Good birding can usually inspire good writing. In Learning the Birds: A Midlife Adventure, Susan Fox Rogers offers a series of elegantly written essays on learning to bird. This is a topic fraught with the danger of cliche, but Rogers knows how to use the essay form to tell a good story and convey the magic of emotional and worldview change. She brings in historical figures and literature to give her personal history wider perspective, writing memorably about experiencing the dawn chorus at the same spot as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ludlow Griscom, and Margaret Suckley in 1942, and hiking the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming in the spirit of 19th-century ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey. This is the title for the person who lives for both literature and nature.
[Donna]: Danielle Whittaker takes a personal viewpoint of a very different aspect of ornithology in The Secret Perfume of Birds: Uncovering the Science of Avian Scent, a perfect blend of science and autobiography. Whittaker’s research aims to disprove the centuries-old assumption that birds do not have a sense of smell. She describes her own and other scientists’ studies while also weaving in her personal career journey, which included a stint as a roller derby referee. (Read the book: it makes perfect sense.) Here’s the kind of woman she is: when she got home after her first day of roller derby bootcamp, she was so sore she had to crawl up her stairs to get into a hot bath, where she cried for an hour. Then, she writes, when her husband gently told her she didn’t have to go back to the camp, “I glared and him and snarled, ‘Oh, I’m [expletive-ing] going back.'” Her book is both informative and fun, a good read.
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