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Droppings:
4/22/2012 Two More New Books for Spring

Bird Sense, subtitled "What It's Like To Be a Bird", by Tim Birkhead, has chapters on Hearing, Seeing, Touch, Taste, Smell, Magnetic Sense and Emotions and there's a jaw-dropping surprise on practically every page. Highly entertaining and informative. Guardian review

Boreal Birds of North America , is more academic, being a collection of articles by a variety of authors discussing various aspects of ornithology relating to boreal species. Lots of charts and tables describing the particular problems these species face.

3/23/2012 Better Birding

Spring is here - a good time to improve one's birding skills. An excellent place to start is the new book "How to Be a Better Birder" by Derek Lovitch. It's full of good advice, illustrative photographs and entertaining anecdotes. A paperback of reasonable size and weight, you can take it with you in the car or on the plane. More details can be found at the Princeton Press site.
1/22/2012 Ocean Birding

One of birding's top tour leaders and teachers has a new field guide for those tricky-to-identify pelagic birds. Its full name is "Petrels, Albatrosses and Storm-Petrels of North America: A Photographic Guide". There are hundreds of photographs to help with the various plumages and the text is entertaining as well as enlightening. There's an e-book which would ease transportation.

A full description is at the Princeton Press site

07/07/2011 Avian Architecture How it's Done

A terrific book on the ways in which birds make their various structures. The writing is clear and entertaining, the bird photos and portraits well-selected but the highlights are the two-page spreads giving step-by-step explanations (with accompanying text) of how the structures are put together. Structures discussed include those of Bower-bird, Firewood Gatherer, Flamingo and many others. The publisher, Princeton Press, is giving away a copy this week. Look here for details.
11/21/09 Screensaver TimeWaster
On a Mac one can "create" a screensaver from a directory of images, optionally displaying them as a continuously changing mosaic. An example, using images from Barry Kent Mackay, is shown below. It's a little rough; looks best in HighQuality and full screen.