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Australian Field Ornithology 2016, 33, 33–34 http://dx.doi.org/10.20938/afo33033034 Book Review The World of Birds by Jonathan Elphick The Natural History Museum, London (published in Australia by CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne), 2014. Hardcover, colour photographs, black-and-white diagrams, 608 pp. RRP AU$90. This book is an with the extraordinary level of scholarship and detail in a encyclopaedic treatment readable, amateur-friendly text. The liberal use of subject of just about everything subheadings means that one can ‘cherry-pick’ a topic of the amateur birder or interest by dipping into the book. ornithologist might want Chapter 10, being the balance of the book (a little to know about the origins, over half), is an exposition of the world’s bird orders and basic biology, behaviour, families,a arranged in taxonomic sequence from ratites ecology, biogeography, to the higher passerines. For each order, there is a brief and ‘family trees’ of the introduction on its family composition and some typical world’s birds (and it is a handy summary for members, and often a comment on the interim nature of professionals, too). It the taxonomic treatment pending further work on DNA. is a book that we have Then follows a tabulated profile of each family, giving needed for a long time, to the number of genera and species, and (for its members help field those questions as a whole) their size/weight range, distribution and in bird newsletters, the Birding-Aus chatline and so on habitat, social behaviour, nests and eggs, incubation and about how or why birds do certain things, their anatomy or nestling periods, food, calls, migration and conservation physiology etc.
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