Relaunched in a stunning boxed set that comes with a richly illustrated book and thirty-six framable prints, this landmark book will fascinate anyone interested in birds, natural history, and art. With an outstanding selection of the most important and vibrant bird images from the unrivaled collection at the Natural History Museum in London, it includes works by some of the most famous natural-history artists ever published, including Audubon, Lear, MacGillivray, and Gould. Birds tells the remarkable story of the development of ornithological art through the ages, from the earliest images of birds in the Renaissance, through the Age of Exploration, to the present day. Brilliantly reproduced original artworks by such renowned artists as Audubon, Gould, MacGillivray, Thorburn, and Wolfe are included. The lively accompanying text tells the story of how ornithological art grew out of the naturalistic tradition of European painting to become a genre on its own, where the artist’s focus on aesthetic appeal was married to the scientist’s need for precision and detail. The detailed text interweaves science, art history, biography, exploration, and travel to paint a vast and wondrous picture of the bygone world of artist-scientists, exotic birds, and faraway lands. It makes a perfect gift for anyone who loves fine prints and drawings or has an interest in nature or birding.

An indispensable resource for anyone in need of avian art, this magnificent compendium comprises more than 600 royalty-free images. Featuring the work of many different artists, it abounds in accurate renderings of ducks and geese, herons, owls, eagles, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, and many other birds, both familiar and less well known, from the world over.

Eleven year-old Ursula Neilsen never believed NASA's verdict that carelessness caused the death of her older sister, an astronaut on a routine mission to a crippled satellite, but there wasn't much a kid could do about it. Years later, she finds herself the target of someone who's trying to kill her because she knows too much. Seeking help from a disgruntled former NASA engineer, she learns the space agency is covering up the presence of an alien her sister made contact with. It's a secret that seems about to cost her her life.

The human history of depicting birds dates to as many as 40,000 years ago, when Paleolithic artists took to cave walls to capture winged and other beasts. But the art form has reached its peak in the last four hundred years. In The Art of the Bird, devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates this heyday of avian illustration in forty artists’ profiles, beginning with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and continuing through to contemporary artists like Elizabeth Butterworth, famed for her portraits of macaws. Stretching its wings across time, taxa, geography, and artistic style—from the celebrated realism of American conservation icon John James Audubon, to Elizabeth Gould’s nineteenth-century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas, to Swedish artist and ornithologist Lars Jonsson’s ethereal watercolors—this book is feathered with art and artists as diverse and beautiful as their subjects. A soaring exploration of our fascination with the avian form, The Art of the Bird is a testament to the ways in which the intense observation inherent in both art and science reveals the mysteries of the natural world.