This volume’s Foreword, by Luis Baptista and Don Kroodsma, is an exhaustive examination of avian bioacoustics.
12 families are covered. We journey to the Antilles to join the diminutive and charming todies, to the Neotropical realm with the elegant motmots, to Madagascar with the threatened ground-rollers and the singular cuckoo-rollers, to sub-Saharan Africa with its gregarious mousebirds and woodhoopoes, to the Old World with its great variety of bee-eaters, rollers and hornbills, and to all the continents with the colourful trogons and kingfishers.
The photographs and illustrations do full justice to the extremely photogenic birds covered in the volume, such as the Quetzal, the Hoopoe and the Rhinoceros Hornbill. There are sequences of photographs of kingfishers hunting underwater, and images of the Southern Ground-hornbill hunting.
Order COLIIFORMESFamily Coliidae (Mouse Birds)
Order TROGONIFORMESFamily Trogonidae (Trogons)
Order CoraciiformesFamily Alcedinidae (Kingfishers)
Family Todidae (Todies)
Family Momotidae (motmots)
Family Meropidae (Bee-eaters)
Family Coraciidae (Rollers)
Family Brachypteraciidae (Ground-roller)
Family Leptosomidae (Cuckoo-roller)
Family Upupidae (Hoopoes)
Family Phoeniculidae (Wood-hoopoes)
Family Bucerotidae (Hornbills)