FEATURE


not a task for the fainthearted. Weighing 5.1 lbs (I weighed it) and containing 592 pages of double column printed text, which isn’t in a large font, there isn’t an easy option if you enjoy reading in bed. Yet this is far too important a book to leave on the coffee table. The authors have not set out to offer an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between birds and people. After all, there are at


least ten thousand five hundred bird species arranged into 200 families. Mark Cocker has described 144 families of birds and listed the 59 families that have been omitted.


However the comprehensive species


index should satisfy almost every bird lover. As a parrot lover myself, I was pleased to find that the parrot family entry of 12 pages was up there with


BIRD SCENE 35


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