Subtitled: Australia's Birds and How they Changed the World..
I bought this myself for a Christmas pressie as Santa's little Helper!
It interested me in it's themes of ornithology, conservation and a strong Aussie flavour to the book.
This is a fabulous book for anyone with an enquiring mind who has a passion for the wildlife of this Country and is also interested in phylogenetics, natural history or just plain beautiful birds.
It takes certain groups of birds as a starting point - (honeyeaters/ parrots/ etc) and looks in detail how they were treated historically, how they are classified now and what impacts they have on the environment and what impacts we are having on them. It is richly interwoven with lots of birding stories and anecdotes from all over the World and has beautiful colour plates in the middle.
It has astonished how much birds have moulded the land scape around us with seed dispersal, nay even created certain landscapes.
Tim Low writes with a knowledgeable and entertaining style and recounts tragic, humorous and dark tales of birds and man.
A great book and one worth re-reading again.
Just thought I would recommend it for anyone on IIS who is interested in this sort of thing!
Graz from Taz
