Many cultures around the world have used bird feathers as decorative accessories to denote status, wealth, and even royalty. Nowhere did this unusual art form reach greater popularity than in China, beginning a thousand years ago and continuing to this day. Using the kingfisher-with its uniquely iridescent range of ultramarine to bright turquoise-blue feathers-as their bird of choice, Chinese artisans created extraordinary objects, rendering the many-hued feathers with exquisite technique. The sheer breadth of these objects is staggering, from massive eight-foot-tall screens to tiny two-inch-long hair pins, from ornately ornamental lanterns to elegantly simple bird cages. Beverley Jackson has once again gathered an exceptional group of objects for study from great museums and private collections alike. Her lively, informative text and unique selection of historical photographs make KINGFISHER BLUE a coffee table book that reads like a novel. The first book-length treatment on this subject. With 150 full-color photographs throughout.

What happens when a master of disguise tries to be herself for once? If you’re private investigator Kat Stone, trouble seems to find you with or without your favorite wig. Kat knows she’s living on borrowed time, waiting for her violent past to catch up with her. Still, she doesn’t expect men to start falling from the sky. On a desolate morning in Fort Washington Park, Kat discovers the body of her building’s French expat maintenance man atop the Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse. The NYPD is quick to dismiss his death as suicide, another lost soul leaping from the bridge overhead. Kat is less than convinced, especially when she learns about his dangerous side hustle, finding jobs for immigrant members of their community. Her investigation turns up unexpected connections to Manhattan’s tony art world, not to mention a host of dark superstitions. When she goes undercover with a deep-sea fishing company, she gets a little too cozy with a colorful cast of characters and a couple of jellyfish. Will she find his killer before her past drags her under? From one of the most acclaimed new mystery writers working today comes a riveting novel of suspense that will have you guessing until the last page is turned.

Kingfishers are a stunning sight to behold. The dash and verve of these cosmopolitan birds has been admired for millennia, appearing in creation myths, imperial regalia, and cultural iconography, and they were once valued as highly as gold. Artists used their iridescent feathers in Tian-tsui, an iconic style of Chinese fine art, for more than 2,400 years. The magnificent temples at Angkor Wat in Cambodia owe their existence in part to the great wealth generated by the live kingfisher trade from the Indochina Peninsula. As well, as a muse, kingfishers have influenced philosophers, playwrights, and artists, from the Roman poet Ovid to Carl Jung, Charles Darwin, and others, while more recently, bio-mimicry engineers have turned to kingfishers for inspiration. This lavishly illustrated book delves into the origins and diversity of the more than 120 species of kingfishers, from the burly kookaburras to the diminutive birds that daringly pluck spiders off webs, defining their characteristics, their differences, their lifestyles, and their cultural significance around the world.

A checklist of the world's 9900+ bird species with latin and English names. Subspecies are not covered. Boxes are also provided for the reader to record their own observations.

Call of the Kingfisher is the enchanting debut from composer and wildlife recordist, Nick Penny. This love letter to a short stretch of Northamptonshire’s River Nene celebrates all the wild things that live there, especially the kingfishers. Uniquely, it comes with bonus audio content to complement the text, accessed via QR codes. Nick has walked beside the river at Oundle for four decades. But for a whole year he gave the waterway all the time it asked for. The more attention he gave it, the more he saw the kingfishers and heard their high whistling calls. Set in a lovely but little-known part of England, Call of the Kingfisher relates a year by the river, the author’s experiences there and the different people he meets. Other strands are woven around the elusive feathered protagonist: explorations of local history and landscape, from Roman and Bronze Age sites to watermills and centuries-old stone churches; visits at different times and to different places in the valley; homages to naturalists who lived nearby; forest dawns and dusks listening to the precious song of nightingales. But the background tapestry is the sights and sounds, and greens and browns, of the riverbank, shot through with the blue and orange threads of a kingfisher’s glowing feathers. As a composer and wildlife recordist, Nick has a deep interest in sounds in the natural environment. He both uses the local landscape and wildlife sounds as inspiration, and brings fresh insights into the sounds of the countryside. The book includes access to a number of high-quality birdsong recordings made alongside the River Nene - audio soundbites of nature’s riches, from kingfishers and nightingales to owls and cuckoos. This is a book about the things that can be seen and heard when we approach nature with patience and curiosity. It celebrates people who have used that focus to help preserve wildlife and pass on their knowledge to future generations. Above all, Call of the Kingfisher serves as a call to appreciate what we’ve got, wherever we are, and to use our ears as much as our eyes when we experience the natural world.

This spectacular field guide includes all resident, breeding and migrant species found in Greater Southern Africa. Comprising South Africa, Lesotho, eSwatini, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, Greater Southern Africa is a vast region home to a truly extraordinary diversity of avifauna. The latest in the Helm Field Guide series, Birds of Greater Southern Africa describes all 1,170 regularly occurring species that are likely to be encountered in the region, from the Wandering Albatross to the Pennant-winged Nightjar. Featuring 272 colour plates by three of the world's leading bird illustrators, this practical guide also includes concise species accounts describing key identification features, status, range, habitat and voice; distribution maps for each species are also included. Fully illustrated throughout, this is an essential reference guide for anyone visiting or living in this wildlife-rich area.