Excellent coverage of disgusting birds

Seriously, you didn't *really* expect me to stop reviewing HBW volumes, did you now?

"The Handbook of the Birds of the World" (HBW for short) is a multi-volume encyclopedia describing and illustrating all 9000 extant species of bird. This is the third volume in this encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias. It covers the Opisthocomiformes, Gruiformes and Charadriiformes. Some of the birds covered are so common that they feel almost jaded, for instance the gulls. Others are exotic and somewhat bizarre. The hoatzin is a bird so unique that it has been placed in an order all by itself. Its chicks have claws on their wings (a bit like the fossil Ur-bird Archaeopteryx) and can swim, something the adult birds don't seem to master. We also get to know the sheathbills, who look a bit like a cross between pigeons and gulls. The sheathbills live on islands close to the Antarctic, and are "opportunistic feeders", to use the euphemistic expression. In plain English, they feed on everything: faeces, discarded placentae or umbilical cords from seal births, and they are even said to steal milk from seals by placing their beaks in between the suckling pups and their mother's mammary glands! I'm not sure if I even want to believe that...

The sheer volume of information contained in this gargantuan book is staggering, and so is its price. The HBW is really a reference work for libraries, and the text can be quite heavy for a general reader. However, these books contain excellent photos, all in color, of a wide variety of birds. Some of them are quite dramatic. This volume shows skuas attacking giant petrels, penguins and even sheep! The photos and color plates are the main reason why even an ordinary Joe might want to own some of the books in this series, but, alas, they are probably too expensive for the likes of you and me.

Still, HBW deserves five stars.

OK, what was that absolutely disgusting stuff about sheathbills, again?