Review: The Atlas of Birds

by Greg Neise on July 26, 2011

When I was told by Princeton that I would be receiving The Atlas of Birds: Diversity, Behavior and Conservation by Mike Unwin for review, I imagined the UPS driver struggling with a shelf-full of volumes. I imagined leafing through The Atlas of Birds for the rest of my normal life…until the pile of notes occupied a closet.

So I was a bit surprised when a fairly normal-sized, large-format soft-cover book arrived. There area LOT of birds and an atlas of birds…I mean really, my National Geographic Atlas of the World only needs legs to make it into a small end-table. I guess I was expecting something similar. The Atlas of Birds is much more manageable.

First impression: this is a colorful book! As colorful and visually stimulating as the birds themselves.

Digging in: The format is easy to understand and follow. The book is ordered into parts, such as “Where Birds Live”, “How Birds Live”, Birds and People” …and so on. Within each part, each topic is given a page-spread. On each spread, information is encapsulated into a sections of a page, usually 1/3 or so. So, for instance, in the section concerning “Pigeons to Cuckoos” we have a reader’s spread (two facing pages), broken into six sections containing a paragraph or two, a map and representative photo for each order.

At first I found myself skimming over a lot of stuff I already knew…or did I? Each time I stopped on a page, I seemed to find some new little snippet to add to my knowledge of birds. I then found myself on a sort of treasure hunt, skimming and pecking through the book to see how many things new to me I could find.

There are a lot.

For instance, I knew that Ruddy Ducks had been introduced to Europe (not sure how I knew that…but I just did), but I didn’t know that the native White-headed Duck was endangered because it is interbreeding so freely with Ruddies. Nearly half of The Atlas of Birds deals with “Birds and People”, especially conservation. The snippets and statistics have caused me to spend a lot of time with “the Google”, to learn more about things mentioned…like the fact that White-rumped Vultures in Nepal have declined precipitously because they ingest the drug diclofenac when feeding on livestock carcasses.

I also learned that the Snowy Sheathbill is the only species found on Antarctica that does not have webbed feet.

Soon, I had placed The Atlas on the coffee table by the couch in the living room, so I could pick through it during my computer breaks.

There’s also a “Bird Table” in the back with statistics (including things like human population, land area, number of bird species, number of endemics, number of threatened species, etc.) for every country, making comparisons easy. For instance you can learn that Costa Rica is 51,100 sq. km., has about 4.5 million people living there, has 35 bird species…WHOOPS! looks like I found a typo. Costa Rica actually has closer to 900 species.

In scanning through the tables I discovered a number of instances where the species count seemed to be off: American Samoa, 36; East Timor, 1. These numbers were provided by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), and clearly there is some data missing or incorrectly entered.

My only other gripe—and really, a typo or data entry error isn’t really anything to gripe about, it happens and I’m sure will be corrected—so, my only gripe concerns the photo-illustrations themselves. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to this because I made my living for years producing the kinds of photo-illustrations used all over The Atlas of Birds.

The photos themselves are wonderful, but in many cases the Photoshop work is, to my eye, not ready for prime-time…quickly done. Poorly executed outlining, drop-shadows that are too flat or cut off, sloppy vignetting…that sort of thing. To be honest, very few people enjoying this book would even notice these things…but like I said, I’m a bit of a Photoshop cop.

Bottom line: I am enjoying The Atlas of Birds very much! Because of the number of bird books I have, very few are allowed to occupy the coffee table for any amount of time. My non-birder wife picked it up and before she knew what was happening, she had leafed through it for nearly a half hour. Not very many bird books will last that long when there are architectural or cooking magazines nearby.

Anyone interested in birds, conservation or wildlife in general will be very happy to have The Atlas of Birds in their bookcase or on the coffee table. At a list price of $22.95, it’s a no-brainer holiday gift for the birder in your life.