San Antonio College Library

"With the Second Edition of his acclaimed text, Frank Gill offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date look at ornithology available. Not just a catalogue of species, it takes a conceptual, research-based approach to communicating an understanding of birds, providing an interpretive context that gives focus and meaning to the details of avian life. You get the latest on the impact of evolution on birds, especially the integration of morphological, behavioral,...

This beautifully illustrated book opens in the middle of the nineteenth century when ornithology was a museum-based discipline focused almost exclusively on the anatomy, taxonomy, and classification of dead birds. It describes how in the early 1900s pioneering individuals such as Erwin Stresemann, Ernst Mayr, and Julian Huxley recognized the importance of studying live birds in the field, and how this shift thrust ornithology into the mainstream of...

Audubon was not the father of American ornithology. That honorific belongs to Alexander Wilson, whose encyclopedic American Ornithology established a distinctive approach that emphasized the observation of live birds. In the first full-length study to reproduce all of Wilson's unpublished drawings for the nine-volume Ornithology, Edward Burtt and William Davis illustrate Wilson's pioneering and, today, underappreciated achievement as the first ornithologist...

Suitable for those who appreciates birds or bird art, this book features: over 385 drawings, artistically arranged in a sumptuous large-format book; accessible, jargon-free text - the only book on bird anatomy aimed at the general reader; drawings and text all based on actual bird specimens; and includes an anatomically distinct bird groups.