EXTINCT BIRDS

by Errol Fuller

Foreword by The Hon. Miriam Rothschild

Extinct Birds is an absorbing study of the world's recently extinct bird species, the first complete survey since Walter Rothschild's classic work of 1907. Drawing together many strands of evidence and supposition, Errol Fuller succeeds in combining scientific accuracy with a lively and readable style.

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Read the about the Great Auk.

Since 1600 some 75 species have become extinct, many since Rothschild wrote his book. The author has drawn on a wide range of sources for his accounts of the birds, their habitats and demise. The evidence of preserved cabinet skins and skeletal specimens is coupled with eye-witness accounts of early travellers as explorers. Their stories are sometimes tantalizingly slight: isolated sightings of a single bird may be the only evidence that a species ever existed. By contrast the expeditions of the nineteenth-century naturalists are well documented and their descriptions are often accompanied by detailed drawings and paintings.

Nearly all species are illustrated with colour plates frome archival sources, including the work of such acknowledged masters of wildlife art as Audubon, Keulemans, Wolf, and Lear. These artists often had the advantage of working from fresh specimens or even from living birds, and their work is a primary source of scientific knowledge as well as being beautiful in its own right.

The stories of these birds are sometimes fantastic, often touching and humorous, but ultimately sad. Extinct Birds is a fascinating record of those species of birds which have been unable to adapt and survive, and a timely reminder of man's capacity to change his environment for the worse.

Errol Fuller is an artist who lives near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. A lifelong fascination with natural history has led him to write regularly on this subject. He has published a study of books and journals. His Monograph of the Kiwis, a book by the New Zealand painter Raymond Ching has also been published and he is working on a further book about The Great Auk an extinct bird that he considers the most curous of them all.

His major intersts, apart from natural history, are boxing and modern jazz and his paintings mostly reflect these themes.