Description
Key Porter Books, Octavo, paperback, text illustrations.
$33.00
A useful new reference book. With a listing of bird species worldwide, a glossary and detailed information on avian biology, anatomy, reproduction and mortality.
Key Porter Books, Octavo, paperback, text illustrations.
Weight | 520 g |
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Darryl Jones is fascinated by bird feeders. Not the containers supplying food to our winged friends, but the people who fill the containers, scatter the crumbs or seeds, or leave the picnic scraps behind for the birds.
Here, Jones takes us on a wild flight through the history of bird feeding as he ponders this odd but seriously popular form of interaction between humans and wild animals. Jones digs at the deeper issues and questions of the practice of bird feeding, as he raises our awareness of the things we don’t yet know and why we really should.
This beautifully written and engaging books reveals that what at first seems to be a niche topic — humans feeding wild birds — is in fact something a disproportionate number of us do. Half the citizens of Australia, the UK, and the US feed birds, whether its by planting trees that attract them, putting food out on apartment balconies, setting up birds baths and feeders, or by unwittingly leaving scraps behind in parks. The international bird seed industry is huge and most of the seed is gown in India or Africa. Another way of describing all this activity is as an unplanned ecological experiment on an unbelievably large scale.
In The Birds at My Table, Jones draws on an impressive knowledge of the latest scientific findings as well as his own personal knowledge, to reflect and explain the modern practice of bird feeding.
“In this international exploration of what seems like a trivial topic, Darryl Jones offers big surprises”—Tim Low
An absorbing study of how birds think, revealing how science is exploding the myth of our feathered friends being ‘bird brained’, and how recent discoveries may call for us to re-evaluate how we identify and classify intelligence in other animals.
Listening to bird songs provides a huge amount of pleasure to people all around the world. But which species are the most melodious and produce the best songs? Expert sound-recordist and bird tour guide Hannu Jännes has travelled the world in search of birds and is uniquely qualified to decide. This beautifully illustrated and very useful book and APP combination brings together 80 of the most remarkable species from around the world. Each has at least one photograph, along with descriptions of key ID features, habitat and distribution, as well as details of the songs and calls which can be heard on the APP. The APP incorporates hundreds of recordings of bird sounds from all over the world, which have been accumulated over a period of many decades.
WAS $23. Birds sing and call, sometimes in complex and beautiful arrangements of notes, sometimes in one-line repetitions that resemble a ringtone more than a symphony. Listening, we are stirred, transported, and even envious of birds’ ability to produce what Shelley called “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” And for hundreds of years, we have tried to write down what we hear when birds sing. Poets have put birdsong in verse (Thomas Nashe: “Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo”) and ornithologists have transcribed bird sounds more methodically. Drawing on this history of bird writing, in Aaaaw to Zzzzzd John Bevis offers a lexicon of the words of birds. For tourists in Birdland, there could be no more charming phrasebook. Consulting it, we find seven distinct variations of “hoo” attributed to seven different species of owls, from a simple hoo to the more ambitious hoo hoo hoo-hoo, ho hoo hoo-hoo; the understated cheet of the Tree swallow; the resonant kreeaaaaaaaaaaar of the Swainson’s hawk; the modest peep peep peep of the meadow pipit.
We learn that some people hear the Baltimore oriole saying “here, here, come right here, dear” and the Yellowhammer saying “a little bit of bread and no cheese.” Bevis, a poet, frames his lexicons – one for North America and one for Britain and northern Europe – with an evocative appreciation of birds, birdsong, and human attempts to capture the words of birds in music and poetry. He also offers an engaging account of other methods of documenting birdsong – field recording, graphic notation, and mechanical devices including duck calls and the serinette, an instrument used to teach song tunes to songbirds. The singing of birds is nature at its most sublime, and words are our medium for expressing this sublimity.