No Title
Mehran Zaidi
BIRDS OF THE GREAT ANDAMANESE by Anvita Abbi Oxford University Press, 2011, 134 pp., 950
November 2011, volume 35, No 11

‘This is a labor of love in more ways than one—deep love both for the scientific work that went into it and for the people whose language and knowledge are the object of this book.’ Luisa Maffi, Co-founder and Director of Teralingua said in her Foreword. This I found out to be true when I read this book. Let me explain how. Being an amateur birdwatcher myself, I am surrounded by dozens of books on birds, and keep going back to them again and again. These range from the compact handbook on the Birds of Kangra by Jan William Den Besten to the exhaustive tome Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by Richard Grimmett and Carol Inskipp. Above all, of course, is the Bible of Indian ornithologists, The Book of Indian Birds by the ‘Birdman of India’ Dr. Salim Ali. Most of these books are indispensible, enlightening and valuable, and have always motivated me to get up and go bird watching to the nearest forest cover.

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