Showing 1–12 of 27 results
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Gulls of the World: A Photographic Guide
Artist/Author: Olsen, Klaus Malling$75.00 Add to cartThis book represents the definitive photographic guide to gulls, by the world’s greatest authority on gull identification, Klaus Malling Olsen.
This outstanding new guide covers all of the world’s gull species, tackling some of the most notoriously difficult identification and taxonomic challenges in birding. Concise text – complemented by an accurate colour range map – places particular emphasis on field identification, with detailed discussion of variation, and coverage of habitat, status and distribution. Each photograph has been carefully selected to highlight identification criteria and, crucially, to allow age and subspecific separation in the field. This book is an invaluable tool for identifying gulls, featuring the most sought-after rarities as well as beautiful, easy-to-identify species.
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Far from Land: The Mysterious Lives of Seabirds
Artist/Author: Brooke, Michael$60.00 Add to cartSeabirds evoke the spirit of the earth’s wildest places. They spend large portions of their lives at sea, often far from land, and nest on beautiful and remote islands that humans rarely visit. Thanks to the development of increasingly sophisticated and miniaturised devices that can track their every movement and behaviour, it is now possible to observe the mysterious lives of these remarkable creatures as never before. This beautifully illustrated book takes you on a breathtaking journey around the globe to reveal where these birds actually go when they roam the sea, the tactics they employ to traverse vast tracts of ocean, the strategies they use to evade threats, and more.
Featuring illustrations by renowned artist Bruce Pearson and packed with intriguing facts, Far from Land provides an extraordinary up-close look at the activities of seabirds.
‘Knowledge about the lives of seabrids has taken a quantum leap in the past two decades, with technological advances providing details of seabird activity when they are far from land. Brooke’s book engagingly discusses how these recent findings have transformed our understanding of seabird natural history.’ George Divoky, Founder and Director of Friends of Cooper Island
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The seabird’s cry: the lives and loves of puffins, gannets and other ocean voyagers.
Artist/Author: Nicolson, Adam.$35.00 Add to cartThe full story of seabirds from one the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand them: their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on a featureless sea, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Comprising of ten chapters, each dedicated to a different bird, and each beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer, the reader travels the ocean paths, looking at the way their bodies work, the sense of their own individuality, the strategies and tactics needed to survive and thrive in the most demanding environment on earth. At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores-reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds’ home. But a global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range.
Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory. -
Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock
Artist/Author: Kress, Stephen W. and Derrick Z. Jackson.$55.00 Add to cartThis is the inspiring story of how a beloved seabird was restored to long-abandoned nesting colonies off the Maine coast. As a young ornithology instructor at the Hog Island Audubon Camp, Dr. Stephen W. Kress learned that puffins had nested on nearby islands until hunters drove them away in the late 1800s. To right this environmental wrong, Kress resolved to bring puffins back to Eastern Egg Rock. Yet bringing the plan to fruition meant convincing skeptics, finding resources, and inventing restoration methods at a time when many believed in “letting nature take its course.” Today, Project Puffin has restored more than 1,000 puffin pairs to three Maine islands. Even more exciting is that techniques developed during the project have helped to restore rare and endangered seabirds worldwide. Further, reestablished puffins now serve as a window into the effects of climate change. The success of Dr. Kress’s project offers hope that people can restore lost wildlife populations and the habitats that support them. The need for such inspiration has never been greater.
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Devil’s cormorant: a natural history.
Artist/Author: King, Richard J.$50.00 Add to cartBehold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant has led a troubled existence in human history, myth, and literature. The birds have been prized as a source of mineral wealth in Peru, hunted to extinction in the Arctic, trained by the Japanese to catch fish, demonized by Milton in Paradise Lost, and reviled, despised, and exterminated by sport and commercial fishermen from Israel to Indianapolis, Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. In The Devil’s Cormorant, Richard King takes us back in time and around the world to show us the history, nature, ecology, and economy of the world’s most misunderstood waterfowl. Also available in hardcover [stock id 36062].
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RSPB Seabirds
Artist/Author: Taylor, Marianne and David Tipling$50.00 Add to cartSeabirds are the living links between land, air and sea. They enjoy a freedom that even humans, with all our technological assistance, can barely imagine. Many species travel mind-boggling distances across the length and breadth of our planet before returning to land to breed in large, deafening and confusingly crowded colonies. Yet within this commotion each mated pair forms a bond of extreme closeness and tenderness that survives separation each winter and may persist for decades.
The long and geologically varied coastline of the British Isles provides homes for internationally important numbers of breeding seabirds. Visiting their colonies is always unforgettable, whether they are cliff-faces packed with Guillemots, islands white-capped by clustered Gannets on their nests, flat beaches crowded with screaming Arctic Terns or seaside rooftops overlaid with a second townscape of nesting gulls. The changing fortunes of these seabird cities reveal to us the health of the vast, unseen but incredibly rich marine world that surrounds us.
RSPB Seabirds showcases some of our most exciting and enigmatic bird species as vital and living components of one of our greatest natural assets: our coastline. The author presents detailed biographies of all the seabird species that breed in and around the British Isles, and also looks at the many species that breed elsewhere but which, regularly or occasionally, visit British waters. Every page of this sumptuous book features beautiful photographs of wild seabirds engaged in their daily work of hunting, travelling, protecting themselves and their territories, courting and raising a family. -
RSPB Spotlight: Puffins
Artist/Author: Dunn, Euan.$20.00 Add to cartEnduringly popular, Puffins are perhaps the most immediately identifiable of seabirds with their decorative bills and distinctive gait. Yet when they take to the air they wheel and turn with great agility and underwater these stocky little birds use short specially adapted wings to propel themselves through the water in pursuit of small fish. Surprisingly little was known about Puffin ecology until recently thanks to their preferred breeding habitat being underground on remote islands or hard-to-reach coastlines. Now Euan Dunn discloses all we have learnt about them as a result of technological advances, and provides a revealing account of their life cycle, behaviour and breeding, what they eat, how they interact in their busy colonies, and where they migrate to in winter. Euan also exposes the mounting threats Puffins face and offers advice on the best places to see them. Each Spotlight title is carefully designed to introduce readers to the lives and behaviour of our favourite birds and mammals.
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The Double-crested cormorant: plight of a feathered pariah.
Artist/Author: Wires, Linda R. and Barry Kent Mackay.$48.00 Add to cartAn endemic species of North America, the double-crested cormorant is an iridescent black waterbird superbly adapted to catch fish. The first Europeans settlers in North America quickly deemed the double-crested cormorant a competitor for fishing stock and undertook a relentless siege on the birds. This book explores the roots of human-cormorant conflicts, dispels myths about the birds, and offers the first comprehensive assessment of the policies that have been developed to manage the Double-crested cormorant in the twenty-first century. Conservation biologist Linda Wires provides a unique synthesis of the cultural, historical, scientific and political elements of the cormorant’s story. She discusses the amazing late-twentieth-century population recovery, aided by protection policies and environment conservation, but also the subsequent U.S. federal policies under which hundreds of thousands of the birds have been killed. In a critique of the science, management and ethics underlying the double-crested cormorant’s treatment today, Wires exposes “management” as a euphemism for persecution and shows that the current strategies of aggressive predator control are outdated and unsupported by science.
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The Secret Lives of Puffins
Artist/Author: Couzens, Dominic and Mark Sisson.$40.00 Add to cartPuffins are among the most instantly recognisable, iconic and well loved of birds. For many they are a highlight of the UK’s summer coastline and their colourful appearance, comedy antics and approachability just add to their popularity. Several ‘hotspots’ are attracting high levels of interest in visits to their colonies. In spite of the high level of interest in, and appeal of, these birds there has been a surprising lack of books focused on Puffins as a species.
Award-winning wildlife photographer Mark Sisson has spent several years photographing Puffins and this book combines images that beautifully encapsulate their charm and visual appeal with an accessible text written by leading wildlife writer Dominic Couzens. The book covers the birds’ life cycle, behaviour, habitats and the current and future challenges that they face, along with many surprising facts and anecdotes.
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The devil’s cormorant: a natural history.
Artist/Author: King, Richard J.$60.00 Add to cartKing goes back in time and around the world to show us the history, nature, ecology, and economy of the worlds most misunderstood waterbirds. Behold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant has led a troubled existence in human history, myth, and literature. The birds have been prized as a source of mineral wealth in Peru, hunted to extinction in the Arctic, trained by the Japanese to catch fish, demonized by Milton in Paradise Lost, and reviled, despised, and exterminated by sport and commercial fishermen from Israel to Indianapolis, Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. Also available in paperback [stock id 37211].
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Peterson reference guide to seawatching: eastern waterbirds in flight.
Artist/Author: Behrens, Ken and Cameron Cox.$45.00 Add to cartSeawatching is the challenging act of identifying waterbirds in flight. Since more than one hundred different species can fly past an observation point, often at great speed or in tightly packed, mixed-species flocks, identification of these distant shapes can be a mystery. The keys to the mystery, the subtle traits that unlock the identity of flying waterbirds, be it wingbeat cadence, individual structure, flock shape and behaviour, or subtle flashes of colour, are revealed in this guide. Though commonly called seawatching, this on-the-fly observation and identification method is by no means restricted to the coast. There are impressive waterbird migrations on the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and many inland lakes and rivers. Nor is it restricted to migrating waterfowl, as the principles of flight identification apply as effectively to ducks flushed off a pond as to distant migrating flocks. Like “Hawks in Flight” and “The Shorebird Guide,” this guide breaks new ground, provides cutting-edge techniques, and pushes the envelope in bird identification even further.
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Albatross.
Artist/Author: Barwell, Graham.$25.00 Add to cartReaktion Animal Series. Albatross looks at the place of these iconic birds in the lives of different peoples and societies. The albatross’s remarkable ease in the air and its huge wingspan strikes all those who observe them, and the huge journeys they undertake across the oceans inspires awe. The bird has been celebrated through proverbs, folk stories, art, and ceremony, most famously in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. People have engaged with the bird over the last two centuries, from those who sought to exploit them to those who devoted their lives to them. Writers, artists and documentary makers have all focused on the albatross and its place in the human imagination has been demonstrated throughout history. The book concludes with a consideration of the bird’s changing significance in the modern world, as well as threats to its continued existence and its prospects for the future.
