“What a terribly depressing book that must be; all those birds about to become extinct” noted a professional colleague to me upon learning I was writing a review of The World’s Rarest Birds. Given the amount of dire environmental media coverage and “urgent” conservation fund-raising material to which most of us are exposed on a regular basis it is an understandably fatalistic assumption – but one that is in this case wholly incorrect. For while there are admittedly a host of troubles presently facing the planet upon which we live and the myriad forms of life with which we share it, Erik Hirschfeld, Andy Swash, and Robert Still are anything but Cassandra-like in their authorship of this book.
Make no mistake, all the bird species profiled in The World’s Rarest Birds are officially classified as Endangered, Critically Endangered, or Extinct in the Wild by the IUCN, and the book does carry a strong conservation-oriented message. However, as the authors so well explain, the reasons for each included species being declared “rare” can vary greatly. Some birds, due to reasons of habitat, life cycle, or other species-specific circumstances are naturally “rare.” Others, of course, have become greatly diminished in numbers due to more recent circumstances such as habitat disruption or loss, pollution, or predation. And finally, a few are so little known to us – having, for example, been once or twice reported but not seen since – that their very existence itself is a mystery.
Indeed, it is partly to the investigation of such mysteries that the book owes its existence. Begun by Hirschfeld and Swash in 2010 as a contest to document photographically all the world’s species of endangered birds, it drew more than 3,500 entries from hundreds of photographers – but more were still needed; thus a second contest was held in 2012 to expand the image catalog even further. The result is the astonishing collection of nearly 1,000 images – augmented with a handful of beautifully rendered illustrations by Tomasz Cofta of species for which no photograph has ever been known to exist – of all the world’s 650 bird species compiled in this book.
However The World’s Rarest Birds is not merely a collection of brilliant photographs; it is an exceptionally well-researched and written compendium of information about the state of the world’s birds, considered both regionally as well as specifically. Each species included in the book is depicted and explained in regard to its geographic distribution (complete with maps), habitat, IUCN classification, and conservation status. In addition to all this, each species entry also contains a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone or tablet in order to open a BirdLife International web page with even more information about it.
Whether one choses to sit down and read The World’s Rarest Birds from cover to cover (an approach highly recommended by this reviewer) or to peruse it casually, its central message will be unmistakably clear: the world is populated with birds in (to borrow the famous words of Charles Darwin) “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” of which a substantial portion are now known to be rare and endangered. How each reader choses to respond to that message then becomes the final judgement about the book itself.
Book Title: The World’s Rarest Birds
Author: Erik Hirschfeld, Andy Swash, and Robert Still
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Format: Clothbound
ISBN: 9780691155968
Published: April 2013
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
