ARTIST Errol Fuller paints boxers for a living but, luckily for us, as a sideline, he has compiled a magical book on The Lost Birds of Paradise (Swan Hill Press, 拢30, ISBN 1 85310 566 X). Maybe he is attracted by the romance behind slaughter: the carnage inflicted on these exquisite birds of New Guinea during the 19th century to satisfy the demands of milliners led to their virtual extinction.
Maybe some rare birds still strut their stuff, unobserved in the darker forests of this, the, least explored island on Earth, but 鈥渕ost have not been encountered since the end of the plume trade and only a very few have been found by ornithologists,鈥� writes Fuller. For us, they exist now as occasional stuffed specimens on dusty museum shelves, captured in the magnificent illustrations assembled here, or as fading plumes on forgotten hats in jumbled attics.
Fuller鈥檚 work is part taxonomy, part mystery story, part ravishing collection of paintings and part potted biography of bird explorers, including the splendidly named Captain Neptune Blood and, bizarrely, the young Errol Flynn in his pre-Hollywood days. A beautiful, original and fascinating book.
Advertisement
A subject as strange as birds of paradise 鈥� and probably rooting around your house right now 鈥� is splendidly surveyed in the latest product of the BBC Natural History Unit, Alien Empire by Christopher O鈥橳oole (BBC Books, 拢17.99, ISBN 0 563 36910 8), the book of the new TV series on insects. You will be able to catch the six programmes linked to the book from early February.
Here are the familiar stories about the 鈥渟ecrets鈥� of insect flight and eyesight, and ruminations on whether bees are robots or social beings. But insects are no quaint evolutionary sideshow. They perform most of the planet鈥檚 key ecological tasks, pollinating fruit and vegetables, recycling nutrients in soils and tuning the chemistry of the atmosphere. There are 200 million insects for every human being. They are, says O鈥橳oole, 鈥渢he real rulers of the world鈥�, and have been for at least 300 million years.
After such a book, it is disappointing to find insects relegated to their usual lowly place in Africa: A Natural History by Chris and Tilde Stuart (Swan Hill Press, 拢24.95, ISBN 1 85310 737 9), where they are offered only bit parts in the strategies of plants and as those irritating things that bite mammals. But otherwise this is a classic natural history. The quality of the pictures is never used as an excuse for sloppy text.
There is deep and detailed knowledge here, imparted in splendidly clear prose by the authors, who are veterans of several African field guides. And, while firmly focused on wildlife, the book never pretends that people don鈥檛 exist. Valuably, it shoots down the myth that Africa a century ago was a virgin Pliocene landscape, and with it the old conservation orthodoxy that wildlife and humans should be kept apart.
Equally steeped in his subject is Richard Prior, whose passion is for roe deer and whose book claims to be the first modern book in English on its biology and behaviour. The roe deer鈥檚 terrain extends from Skye to Vladivostok, and from Syria to the foothills of the Himalayas. Yet it seems to thrive best in Britain. Once hunted almost to extinction in these islands, it has revived with 20th-century reafforestation. Today there may be half a million of the animals roaming the land, despite an annual cull of about 50 000.
Though written for the general reader and heavily illustrated, Roe Deer (Airlife Publishing, 拢45, ISBN 1 85310 532 5) is hardly coffee-table material. The quality of the photographs is poor. And there are too many images of deer half eaten by dogs and ripped up by farm machinery for many tastes.
Nearer the mark is Antlers, a 鈥減ictorial study of the antlered animals of Europe and North America鈥� by Erwin A. Bauer (Swan Hill, 拢19.95, ISBN 1 85310 748 4). Unashamedly playing on our fascination with antlers as symbols of male power and virility, the text and splendid pictures are a constant round of rutting and roaring among herds of elk and caribou, reindeer and moose.