The Heron's Handbook

Rating:
Summary: spectacular guide to all herons, egrets, and bitterns!
Review: Authors James Hanock and James Kushlan, along with illustrators Robert Gillmor and Peter Hayman have put together a simply gorgeous guide to all the world's species of herons, egrets, and bitterns. A guide to herons on every continent except Antarctica, all 60 species as recognized by the book, it is a thorough treatment of each one. Each species has a breathtaking color illustration, many times an additional black and white illustration, the common name, genus and species name, alternate common names, when and who first described it as species, maps illustrating range (including directions of migration and areas of casual occurrences), several paragraphs describing in detail their physical appearance, notes on their distribution and population, migration, habitat, behavior flying, feeding, and breeding, descriptions of nests, eggs, and young, and a note or two on taxonomy. Subspecies are noted as well; for instance a two page color range map depicts the 30 subspecies of the green-backed heron, found throught the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and several Pacific and Indian Ocean island groups.

In addition to being a thorough field guide and collection of natural history notes on the world's herons, egrets, and bitterns the first section of the book contains useful articles on heron classification, courtship, feeding, and tips on identifying herons and egrets, including several color plates that aid in identifying the many white herons and egrets that live around the world. An extensive bibliography closes out this work.

Whether you want to read more about the great blue heron or the black-crowned night heron that lives around the local river or swamp, or something more exotic, like the black heron of Africa or the zigzag heron of South America, then this is the book for you. The book will also be of interest to conservationists, as several species such as the slaty egret have very restricted ranges (in this case known to breed only in the Okavango swamp in northwest Botswana) or very small populations such as Malagasy heron.