Unsolicited Advice (LONG!) for Those Who Love Bird Art or Books on Migration

[PAUL ROBERTS]

In the midst of spring bird migration, unsolicited advice for those who love to read and learn.

     Roberta J.M. Olson has a wonderful article, "A New Look at 'The Birds of America:' Audubon as Artist," in the May 2024 issue of Natural History Magazine. I don't think I believed the title when I began the piece, but after reading it twice, it is worth the price of a subscription alone.(Article not available online.) If you love bird art, if you have any idea who Mark Catesby or Alexander Wilson were, you should really appreciate this interpretation of what Audubon brought to the world of bird art. If you don't know who Catesby and Wilson were, but are familiar with John James Audubon's name and reputation as an artist, you should find this article incredibly enlightening. At the end of the article, you'll learn it was excerpted from Olson's new book, "Audubon as Artist" (2024). I am definitely ordering the book.  

    Second, and by no means least, Ian Newton has just published the second edition of his classic "The Migration Ecology of Birds."  If you are fascinated by bird migration and really want to learn more about it, I couldn't recommend any book more, even though I have read only 110 pages of this book to date. Years ago I developed a list of  books in response to my own question, "If you were sentenced to exile on a lonely atoll and could take only five books with you to read for the rest of your life, what would those five be? (I think I was going on an extended vacation in the Maine woods.) Newton's first "Migration Ecology" replaced Thomas Alerstam's classic "Bird Migration," (1990) of my list of five best books. Newton's first edition, published in 2008, was to my mind the best (i.e., most informative and insightful) bird book ever written. I've reread parts of it every year and am still learning from it. However, that book's research ended in 2006, when much if not most of what we knew about bird migration was based on bird banding (or ringing, as they call it the UK).

    Newton, who is 84 years young, determined to update what he must know is his masterpiece with all the insights and understanding developed by the explosive growth of knowledge acquired/developed by the use of telemetry-based tracking in bird research. That, plus a better understanding of bird anatomy, physiology and flight, compelled him to write this update.

    It is not for the faint of heart or someone with a hernia. The  book is 700 pp long. (8.75 in X 11.25) and retails for $150 (Academic Press, 2024). It is well worth every penny. He notes in the preface that he basically had to delete a lot of information from his first edition to update the volume, but that none of the deleted material was "incorrect" in any way. The book is directed primarily to research ("graduate") students. He includes 3000 citations, one third of which are to research published since 2008.

     If you don't know Newton, be advised in that in 2020 he published a 600-pp paperback "Bird Migration" that was about half the length of "Migration Ecology" and very reasonably priced. It is an incredible book and well worth reading, but not to be confused with "Migration Ecology of Birds."  

     To put Newton in better perspective for those who aren't familiar with him, he is a superb researcher, analyst and writer who has written four of my top five bird books (which are surprisingly weighted towards raptors). In my opinion, he is without peer as a raptor researcher. He was also Chair of the Peregrine Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and President of the British Ornithologists Union and the British Ecological Society. He is perhaps the best scientific writer I have ever read. 

     It is time to read Chapter 7. "Raptors and Other Soaring Birds." Reading one chapter a day the book will take me only a month before I have to start rereading it because my feeble mind cannot grasp everything in one read (or two). This is a book I will be rereading for the rest of my life, so I better get back to it right away. If you do read the book and like it, please let me know. If you spent $150 and a month of your life working your way through it and DIDN'T like it, I'm sure you'll let me know.  

      

Best,

Paul       

         

Paul M. Roberts
Medford, MA 
phaw...@comcast.net

[Andrew Whitacre]

This is great, Paul!

For what it's worth, if anybody here works at a local university, you can usually request your school purchase a copy of pricey books like The Migration Ecology of Birds. (I just did!)

If we're recommending other books that, like Paul's suggestion of Newton's, are more ornithological than general reading, I've enjoyed the following over the last couple years (though they definitely reflect my preoccupation with bird sounds):

• Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, by Jeremy Mynott. "Drawing extensively on literature, history, philosophy, and science, Jeremy Mynott puts his own experiences as a birdwatcher in a rich cultural context."
  
  
• Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, by Scott Weidensaul. "Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American birding: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between border skirmishes; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a convicted blackmailer) and the endlessly self-mythologizing John James Audubon."
  
  
• The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong, by Donald Kroodsma. This one is an interesting mix of textbook and memoir. If you're interested in becoming better versed in birdsong science, you can't skip Kroodsma.
  
  
• Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations, by Clive Catchpole and Peter J.B. Slater. A literal textbook.
  
  
• Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong, by Joeri Bruyninckx. If I recall correctly, this was an adaptation of Bruyninckx's Ph.D. dissertation. The descriptions of early recording techniques are fascinating, such as when researchers had to haul a wagon of equipment and record onto wax cylinders. A far cry from recording with a phone.
  

And then not specifically about birds, but good for context...

• Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World, by Bernie Krause
• How Early America Sounded, by Richard Cullen Rath

And lastly a brand-new one I haven't read but am intrigued by, because Princeton University Press just withdrew it from publication days before its pub date. I snagged a review copy on Amazon and am awaiting its delivery:

• Birds through Indigenous Eyes: Native Perspectives on Birds of the Eastern Woodlands, by Dennis Gaffin

You'll notice all the authors have one thing in common. I don't know if that's a bias within ornithology generally, as it is with many sciences, or more with which ornithologists manage to get published.

Andrew

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