Bald Coot & Screaming Loon contains over 1000 entries of remarkable information about birds, birdlife and birdwatching. Chapters include: The Last of the Dinosaurs: How birds evolved and adapted; The Cloaca Monologues: Courtship & Breeding; A Cracking Start: Raising a family; Sing A Song of Sixpence: Why birds sing and call; Why don't birds wee? Birds and their bodies; A Complex Relationship: Birds & man; The Majesty of Flight: How and why birds fly; Pole to pole without a map: The mystery of migration; Bird Brain: Instinct or intelligence?; Weird Birds & Strange Behaviour: A curate's egg of a chapter; and The Battle for Survival: How birds are faring in a damaged world
Woven into this wealth of knowledge are famous quotations, anecdotes, traditional sayings, lines of verse, practical advice for attracting and spotting birds, and words of rural wisdom. The spirit and focus of the Almanac is British but the book also travels as far and distant as the world's birds themselves. It is truly an essential handbook for every bird lover.
You don't have to be a dedicated birdwatcher to be a bird lover. Millions of us love the sight and sound of them and delight in the fact that wherever we are in the world, even in the desert or the Arctic, we are surrounded by birds. And yet even the most educated among us know very little about their remarkable behaviour, incredible diversity and the story of their evolution. While worthy tomes provide information about habitat, appearance, feeding, number of eggs laid and so forth, very few have succeeded in conveying the magic and mystery of birds.
Why is it that only male birds sing? . . . If birds have such small brains, how come they know where to go when migrating thousands of miles? . . . Are birds really descended from dinosaurs? . . . How do birds have sex?
This handbook sets about answering every interesting question there is to ask about birds. There are over 10,000 species in the world, including over 500 in Britain, some rare and endangered, some bizarre and beautiful, others common and familiar. As this captivating and often humorous handbook reveals, all of them are fascinating when we stop to peer into their truly curious world.
