"Bird Love" is a book about bird courtship, mating, nesting — the entire process for the bird world, with side trips to sex role reversals, group breeding, and brood parasitism.
What drew me into the book were its outstanding photographs of birds young and old. Many of the images cover a full 8x10-inch page. Page design takes advantage of photo content.
Begin on page 6 with a stunning image of a pair of barn swallows. End with brown-headed cowbird and Kirtland's and yellow warbler. The book discusses birds world-wide, but is heavily illustrated with photos of North American species. Uniquely, the book includes dozens of research papers among its listing of additional resources.
There is one thing about this book that I don't understand. There are headings, blocks of introductory text for each section, and captions, all in bold type of appropriate size (well, caption type is very small). These all are easy to read, captions excepted. What puzzles me is the type selection for the text. Chosen was a thin sans-serif face, two elements that do not encourage reading, printed small, certainly no help. The text type disappears on the page. (Serifs are slight projections at the head and foot of a letter offering reading ease by aiding the eye in character recognition.)
So, without the serif clues, and without reasonable visibility of the thin characters, well, the photos are beautiful.
I should add that the pages are well-designed, and that is not only good, but perhaps also a clue. I think that text type blocks were regarded as design elements, with little concern for readability. In short, a designer's book, book world eye-candy. Very annoying in what is otherwise a concisely stated visit to a significant part of the life of birds.
The book was written by Wenfei Tong, research associate at Harvard and a faculty member at the University of Alaska, and Mike Webster, professor of ornithology at Cornell University. It was published by Princeton University Press, as hardcover, at 192 pages, indexed, and profusely illustrated. Price is $29.95.
