Or did you know that with at least 11000 species they are the most diverse vertebrate class on the planet?

Dit is een boek dat je niet van A tot Z moet lezen, mag natuurlijk, maar ik leg het boek het liefst naast het bed: om er vogel per vogel van te genieten. oilbird (Venezuela), snow goose (Canada), hoopoe (Italy), cassowary (Australia), puffin (Iceland), shoebill (Uganda), kakapo (New Zealand), and many others.The only thing that would make me enjoy this even more, is if it was a nature television series with Attenborough narrating. The art in this book - by Arturo Miyake - is something else and, to me, one of the biggest highlights. The prose is wonderfully conversational, perfect for the amateur birder or naturalist (such as myself! This beautiful and inspiring book tells the stories of 80 birds around the from the Sociable Weaver Bird in Namibia which constructs huge, multi-nest 'apartment blocks' in the desert, to the Bar-headed Goose of China, one of the highest-flying migrants which crosses the Himalayas twice a year.

La verdad que cuando te adentras el él, te das cuenta de que es mucho más sofisticado y fascinante de lo que pueda parecer. I don't think I can do justice to just how beautiful this book is - you need it as a physical book, in your hands, because it is so gorgeous. I mean, three were gone when I showed up and the one who was alive didn’t speak English and lived across an ocean so I saw her maybe five times. I was immediately enthralled by the beautifully shining illustrations from Ryuto Mikaye, turning each bird into a masterpiece of flow and movement on the page. I’d already loved ‘Around the World in 80 Trees’ in this loose series from Laurence King Publishing and was really looking forward to this one, so much I popped into work on my holiday to pick it up as soon as I found out it was there.

The other is the Crested Caracara which we were told is really intelligent and curious, but has become a pest in certain areas of Central America, raiding houses by going down chimneys and opening doors and windows.

However, that Mike Unwin does not bother with avian evolution in Around the World in 80 Birds, that he has no section devoted to extinct birds and is in my opinion often not nearly critical and condemning enough regarding birds threatened and endangered by us humans, by our actions, by habit loss, by over-hunting, pollution and the like, this has definitely rather bothered me (and enough so that my final rating for Around the World in 80 Birds simply cannot be higher than three stars, still to be warmly recommended, but also with some caveats and reservations).I'd never heard of the oilbird or the purple-crested turaco before but my world is much the richer for having learned about them here. We get a nice overview of what the birds look like, their way of life and brief anecdotes of what they are known for (like them being national emblems and why, if they are featured in important literary works, legends or myths etc).

Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! Each chapter discusses the bird, it's locale, migratory habits (if they do), word description of the male and female, mating and breeding along with time for eggs to hatch and how long the parents care for the chicks along with the level of conservation it currently sits at - not only in the wild but in private sanctuaries and zoos. Mención especial a la belleza de ilustraciones de Ryuto Miyake, que me han tenido embelesada toda la lectura. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.

I’ve been really lucky in marriage many ways and one is that I’ve inherited a set of “grandparents in law” who’ve shared so much love and wisdom.