Book Review Extreme Birds
Extreme Birds The world’s most extraordinary and bizarre birds
By Dominic Couzens – (2011)
287 pages; high quality gloss art paper, with 135 colour photos.
Soft Cover: 20.8cm x 18.7cm.
ISBN: 978-1-55407-952-0
Firefly Books, New York
I quite like this book, it is very informative, interesting and at times quite an amusing read. The author has adopted a slightly novel approach to illustrate the great diversity of the world’s bird fauna in many aspects including social habits, environment, longest flight, eating habits, most unusual foraging, mating and even communal defensive tactics among many other designated extreme categories. One might say it could be referred to, in part, as a Guinness book of records for birds.
It is presented in four main chapters, the first ‘Extreme Form’, second ‘Extreme Ability’, third ‘Extreme Behavior’ and the fourth ‘Extreme Families’. Within each of these chapters a single species is used to illustrate an extreme example of a particular attribute or perhaps a not so flamboyant appeal. The attributes and categories do vary somewhat. For example in ‘Extreme Form’ there is the “Biggest Eyes”, “Longest Bill”, “Best Grooming Aids”, “Sexiest Tail”, “Heaviest Testes” and “Worst Flyer” in the midst of numerous others. And in ‘Extreme Ability’ there is the “Fastest Swimmer”, “Highest Migration”, “Greediest Berry Eater”, “Longest Life” etc. with other types of extreme categories applied in the remaining two chapters. All chapters are beautifully illustrated with ‘large’ high quality colour photos, some of them no less than spectacular.
Normally when I read a book for review, I first read the contents page, then the introduction and then on my way to the back of the book to check the extent of the bibliography and or list of references (before reading the rest of the book), I flick randomly through the book to see if anything immediately catches my eye. Those random pages in this particular case certainly did catch my eye and in fact, I kept reading one category example after another until I realized I had already ready 2/3 of the book and I still had to check the bibliography. By this stage I was so enthralled with the book and the very informative, excellently illustrated and novel approach the author had taken, I was even considering it worthy of our rare “Excellent Book” award. So, perhaps then, readers will understand my shock and immeasurable disappointment only to discover there was no bibliography! Consequently, as much as I enjoyed this book, there will be no “Excellent Book” award and I am left wondering how could such a good book not have a bibliography?
Rod Rice
Principal Reviewer
Nature & Travel Books