New picture book about birds: From Flirty to Capercaillie and charming little owl

These days, bird-watchers are once again on heightened alert. You will find trees, lakes, and fence posts with binoculars, scour Online databases, check the local feed. Contrary to popular belief, Hobby-ornithologists would have to do in the Winter, nothing is worth the view in the sky also from December to February. Because then you are in the us, the mountain finches and Zwergsäger, Rotdrosseln and Raufußbussarde.

Kai Spanke

volunteer.

F. A. Z.

And the waxwings. On the basis of the taiga zone, where they breed and spend the summer, they eat more and more in the direction of the South. Their diet consists mainly of leftover, for part of it properly fermented fruit. Who’s eaten too much of it, is at the end – in spite of an extra large liver – drunk. Well this has been documented, for example, in 2014 in the canadian Whitehorse. There a number of waxwings were so tipsy that they brought to sober up in the veterinary clinic.

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Such anecdotes and historical excursions are Mats and Åsa Ottosson equal to culture. Shakespeare’s troublesome Star of “Henry IV,” also finds mention as Zenodotos of Ephesus, was not only the first head of the library of Alexandria, but it was a good two thousand and three hundred years, realized that Robin is a loner. Amazing facts of biology: cock, tit, whose breeding has not been successful, help other dogs in the rearing of the young, and bar-tailed Godwit to fly eleven thousand miles from their breeding grounds in Alaska to their winter quarters in new Zealand without interruption.

The authors refer to all this with admiration, and, in places, downright playful: The Wren it was, according to Ted Hughes, “the freckled-faced inspector of the basement of the forest”, the pygmy owl, our smallest owl, have a lot of “charm factor” that Auerhahn “Opera flirtatious”. Too much of a Good thing? May be, but anyone who deals in detail with these birds, will not admit that everything is so wrong.

more Important than the texts and the magnificent photographs by Roine Stenberg Magnusson. The book owes its title: “birds are very close”. Magnusson has set his models in a soft Box, which is referred to as a light tent. To avoid unnecessary Stress, was darkened the tent with a cloth. Out portraits that not only capture the characters of the birds, but also the structure and colors of individual feathers is exactly the recognition came.