You are browsing the archives of books.

Like many people the world over I’ve wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands ever since I knew they existed.  Whether this desire is because of the influence of the islands on Darwin and his theory of evolution, the numerous documentaries about them, the fact that Kurt Vonnegut based a novel there, their distance from everything [...]

How does one end up with a Great Blue Heron in one’s bathroom?  Or spending hard-earned cash on medication for a Wild Turkey with a “nasty wet rasp” coming from her chest?  Or chasing an American Goldfinch that refuses to leave a flight cage even though there is nothing wrong with him any more?  Easy, [...]

A whole ten days ago - or about thirty posts in ‘10,000 Birds’ time - we asked for your help supporting a friend of mine, ex-pat Brit birder/ID expert Richard Crossley, secure a TV deal for a programme he is aiming to make. Many of you responded (thanks) by filling in an online survey, and [...]

It was extremely difficult to decide a winner of the Corvus: A Life with Birds giveaway.  Five stellar entries were received and all are deserving of victory but there can only be one winner.  Fortunately for this overworked and underpaid blogger I got to remove a couple of the entries from competition based on technicalities [...]

It has been awhile since I reviewed Esther Woolfson’s Corvus: A Life with Birds (I liked it), but the American edition has just been published by Counterpoint Press and, fortunately for you, they have agreed to work with 10,000 Birds to give away a copy of Corvus: A Life with Birds to one of you!  [...]

If you have any plans to bird Mesoamerica you need to purchase A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America posthaste.  The two who put the guide together, Steve Howell, who did the text, and Sophie Webb, who did the plates, spent over seven years on the project and the expertise that [...]

Just published, ‘Birdscapes: Birds in our Imagination and Experience‘ (henceforth BBIE) by Jeremy Mynott is an extremely hard book to review properly (and is not to be confused with last winter’s ‘Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound’ by the way - how typical, you wait ages for one ‘Birdscapes’ and then [...]

Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species, by Mira Tweti, is a wonderful source for those looking to understand the intersection of people and parrots.  The book progresses nicely from a brief overview of the current scientific understanding of the complexities of bird brains, focusing [...]

I’m a New Yorker.  I was born in the Hudson Valley and grew up in the Catskills, went to school in the Southern Tier, lived in Albany, our capital city, explored the Adirondacks and the North Country, repeatedly visited western New York and now live in New York City, easily the best city in the [...]

When I am having anything larger than the mailbox in my apartment building shipped to me I specify that I need to have it shipped to my job because it is a pain to walk over to the local post office and pick up a package seeing as the hours that I work tend to [...]

Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick was originally published in an over-sized, luxury edition but is now available in a much smaller (about 6″ by 5.5″), more affordable, twenty-dollar edition.  Despite the small size there is a ton of content in the 336 page book.  It is gorgeously illustrated with 300 well-chosen images [...]

Living in a house with uncaged birds is not for everyone and that goes double for those brave enough to live with corvids.  Usually ranked up there as among the smartest of birds, corvids, which include jays, crows, magpies, and ravens, are fascinating creatures that have been mythologized, persecuted, deified, and hunted throughout human history.  [...]

I recently wrote an enthusiastic review of “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa: a novel” by Nicholas Drayson (you’ve not read the review? You should - it’s a great book!). I really enjoyed this charming and highly entertaining novel - but did highlight a few mistakes I’d found concerning a couple of the [...]

Review: “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel”
Nicholas Drayson
The summer holidays are coming (for some of us anyway) and perhaps you’re thinking about a book to read “on the beach” or in the hammock at home? If you are - and even if you’re not - I’d like to recommend [...]

There are some absolutely gorgeous photos of birds in Scott Leslie’s Woodland Birds of North America. The book, which is billed on the cover as “A guide to observation, understanding, and conservation,” has at least two pictures of almost every one of the nearly 100 species described in it (nearly 200 pictures altogether). [...]

Kenn Kaufman is a birding celebrity. He is well-known not only for his field guides but also for his North American Big Year, famously described in his memoir, Kingbird Highway, in which he describes his hitchhiking, cat-food eating, country-criss-crossing attempt at breaking the Big Year record (he did, but another birder beat the record [...]