This volume is the first of a set of seven which, when complete, will cover the entire avifauna of Africa, one of the most varied and interesting in the world. While many regional guides to African birds exist, this will be the first comprehensive guide to the bird life of the continent as a whole, including North Africa.
The entire set covers all species of birds found in Africa, including migrants from the Palearctic and vagrants. Resident birds are described in full detail, with sections on their range and status, description, field characters, voice, general behaviour, food and breeding biology. Visitors are also given extensive coverage, with emphasis on their status and behaviour within Africa.
These volumes are sure to be acclaimed as the authority on the avifauna of Africa for many years to come. The quality of the text and the beauty of the plates will assure them pride of place on the shelves of ornithologists and bird-watchers everywhere. Indeed, anyone with an interest in natural history or ecology will find her a source of much interest and enjoyment.
Leslie Hilton Brown, OBE, DSc, was born in India in 1917. He graduated in Zoology at St. Andrews University and went on to further courses in tropical agriculture at Cambridge and in Trinidad, joining the Colonial Agricultural Service in Nigeria in 1940. From there, in 1946, he moved to Kenya, where he lived for the rest of his life. His professional duties in agriculture did not prevent him from devoting large amounts of his indefatigable energy to observation and research on pelicans, flamingos and, particularly, eagles. In 1968 the two-volume
Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World (written with Dean Amadon) appeared. Between 1970 and his death, Leslie Brown published over a dozen books on birds, including the impressive
British Birds of Prey (1076) - remarkable for having been written by a man resident in Africa. How he did it was described in
The Bird-Watcher's Book (1973).
Encounters with Nature (1979) and his ornithological thriller,
The Mystery of the Flamingos (1973) are perhaps the best known of his other works. All his writing is characterized by his immense enthusiasm and excitement, and his keen intellect.
The Birds of Africa was to have been the jewel in the crown of his lifetime's achievement: as it is, after his death in Kenya in August 1980, it will also be his epitaph.
Emil K. Urban is co-chairman of the African Working Group on Cranes and is highly involved in studies on status, distribution, and life history of cranes. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union and received the first Louis K. Bell Alumni Research Award at Augusta College, Georgia. For many years he has worked on birds and mammals in Ethiopia, and was involved in the planning stages of the first edition of The Birds of Africa Dr. Urban has published numerous papers on African birds, including A Checklist of Birds of Ethiopia. Urban is currently Chairman of the Department of Biology at Augusta College, Georgia.
Kenneth Newman was born in Basingstoke, England. He studied commercial art, and this led him into a career in advertising in London and in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he emigrated in 1948. An interest in birds, formulated during his childhood on the Sussex Downs, turned him towards serious bird photography in the late 1950's and he thereafter produced photographic bird articles for British magazines, culminating in his first book on birds in 1967, illustrated with his own paintings. A year later he gave up advertising to devote himself to bird painting and writing full-time. He has exhibited in London, the USA and Johannesburg, and has published a number of illustrated books including Garden Birds of South Africa and Birdlife in Southern Africa (Ed.). He also re-illustrated, in 1978, the well known Robert's Birds of South Africa handbook.
