New Titles

 

 

1) Stokes, Lillian Q. and Matthew A. Young. The Stokes Guide to Finches of the United States and Canada. 2024. Little, Brown and Company. Paperback: 332 pages. Price: $21.99 U.S.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: Learn all you need to know about identifying and attracting finches with this comprehensive, gloriously colorful field guide from America’s foremost authorities on birds and nature.

     Following the extraordinary finch superflight of 2020-2021, birders across the country became obsessed with finches. With The Stokes Guide to Finches of the United States and Canada, you can gain expert knowledge on these beautiful birds and bring them into your own yard. This fully illustrated guide tells you all you need to know about attracting, observing, and protecting finches.

The book also includes:

• A special section on endangered Hawaiian honeycreeper finches, plus other rare and vagrant species
• Detailed identification information on each finch species’ plumages, subspecies, and voice
• The most complete and up-to-date range maps, including maps of core occurrence and irruption ranges for all red crossbill call types, which have never before been published in a guide
• Complete life history information
• Scientific studies on finch migrations and conservation
• More than 345 stunning full-color photographs and over 50 range maps covering 43 species

RECOMMENDATION: This book is a MUST-HAVE for anyone with an interest in the finches of the region!

 

2) Thomas, Rob. The Storm-petrels. 2024. T & AD Poyser. Flexibound: 335 pages. Price: $50.00 U.S.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY:  Imagine a bird as small as a sparrow, which lives most of its life on the open ocean yet can survive for decades. It walks on the water, and migrates half way around the world, returning to remote islands to breed underground, often in exactly the same rock crevice each year. To attract a mate it sings like a fairy and smells aromatic, but it vomits oil onto its enemies. It visits its nest by night, lays a single enormous egg, and feeds its chick until the nestling weighs more than both parents put together. It seems to have little fear of humans, but was itself feared by ancient seafarers. This might sound like the stuff of legend, but is actually the description of the European Storm-petrel, a member of the Hydrobatidae family.

     The latest in the Poyser series, with comprehensive text and beautiful illustrations, this follows the remarkable life of the storm-petrel. Focusing on the European species, it tracks their lives from the remote North Atlantic islands, where they breed via the coasts of Africa, to the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, where they spend the northern winter. There is also discussion on other members of the storm-petrel family. We learn about their evolution, behaviour, ecology, and adaptations to a life in the harsh and unpredictable environment of the open ocean, and discover what these enigmatic seabirds can tell us about what humans are doing to our planet.

RECOMMENDATION: This book is a MUST-HAVE for anyone with an interest in the storm-petrels!  

 

 

3) Elphick, Jonathan. Ferdinand Bauer's Remarkable Birds. 2024. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Hardbound: 240 pages. Price: $74.99 U.S.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: A richly illustrated volume, which reproduces one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century ornithological art in its entirety.

      In 1786, Austrian natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer traveled to Italy and the Levant. The watercolors he created from meticulous drawings made during the trip are among the finest examples of natural history illustration. Bauer’s botanical paintings are well known yet this industrious artist also made stunning illustrations of over a hundred different bird species, very few of which have been published until now.

      This book describes Bauer’s early life, achievements, and his experiences of traveling for fifteen months—often facing the perils of weather, illness, bandits, and pirates. It also details his field method of recording the precise colors of the birds on his pencil drawings by employing his scheme of coloring by numbers, each representing a specific hue, to be used as a reference when he returned to Oxford.

      Each illustration is reproduced alongside a facing page of vivid expert text describing the characteristics of each bird, interwoven with aspects of their ornithological and cultural history as well as comments on Bauer’s depictions. Not widely seen since they were painted approximately 230 years ago, and now reproduced in their entirety, these beautiful paintings represent one of the finest collections of late eighteenth-century ornithological art. 

RECOMMENDATION: This book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in historical bird art.

4) Howard, Jules. Infinite Life: The Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution, and Life on Earth. 2024. Pegasus Books. Hardbound: 258 pages. Price: $29.95 U.S.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: An expansive investigation into the most unifying and enduring structure in the history of life—and a story of biological richness at a moment when so much of our precious biodiversity hangs in the balance.

     Eggs are the origins of 90 percent of the Earth’s organisms. They can be found as far apart as deep-sea volcanoes and in space. Yet despite their fundamental importance, eggs often find themselves an afterthought in the discussion of evolution of life on Earth as the interests of scientists congregate around the things that emerge from eggs rather than the eggs themselves.

      In his new book Infinite Life: The Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution, and Life on Earth, Jules Howard explains—with great passion, authority, expertise, and infectious enthusiasm—why it’s time to give eggs their moment in the spotlight: it is the eggs that can teach us new and surprising lessons about Earth’s history, the trials of life, and the exceptional ways in which natural selection operates to propagate the survival of individual species.

      Infinite Life: The Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution, and Life on Earth, offers a wholly new perspective on the animal kingdom, and, indeed, life on Earth. By examining eggs from their earliest histories to the very latest fossilized discoveries—encompassing the myriad changes and mutations of eggs from the evolution of yolk, to the hard eggshells of lost dinosaurs, to the animals that have evolved to simultaneously give birth to eggs and live young—Howard reveals untold stories of great diversity and majesty to shed light on the huge impact that egg science has on our lives.

RECOMMENDATION: This book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in this aspect of evolutionary biology.