The World of Birds

The scale of Jonathan Elphick's achievement in producing this impressive book is readily evident in the thorough and engaging text, which weaves a narrative around the World's 195 bird families. Alongside the text are numerous photographs, beautifully reproduced and featuring many leading photographers. The 10 chapters, spread over 600 pages, are divided into two sections. The first section examines the origins of birds, their anatomy, physiology, behaviour, populations and movements, not to mention the ways in which we interact with them. The second section, which is the longer of the two, takes a more detailed look at each of the 32 bird orders and the families they contain. 

Each family of birds is treated in turn and each begins with an overview of the number of genera and species it contains, and an exploration of the family's range of behaviours, movements and conservation status. A longer narrative then follows, highlighting the different sub-families and their key species and revealing some fascinating facts; the most numerous wild bird is the Red-billed Quelea, with a total population of roughly 1.5 billion individuals, although this pales into insignificance when viewed alongside a domestic chicken population thought to number as many as 20 billion individuals alive at any one time.

A book of this kind is likely to draw comparison to The Handbook of Birds of the World but it is a very different book, more compelling in its narrative and more accessible to a wider audience (as you might expect of a book published by the Natural History Museum). This is the sort of book that will stimulate more detailed interest, that will appeal to a new generation of young ornithologists and will be dipped into by those wishing to broaden their knowledge more widely.

This, then, is a coffee table book of substance, rich in information and likely to engage and enthuse even the most casual of readers. The cover price, just £40, doesn't do justice to the quality of both the material contained within and the manner in which it has been presented.

Book reviewed by Mike Toms