Coffee Table Book of: Waterfowl (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Waterfowl is a large format book of wild ducks, geese and swans, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: the birds on still ponds, rushing streams, cold seas and wide marshes, their heads, feet and feathers seen close, their nests, eggs and young, and the empty wetlands where they live, at many hours and in every season.

A pair of wood ducks swims on an autumn pond at sunrise, a drake perches on a bare branch and a hen waits at the mouth of a tree hollow, mandarins swim on still ponds in autumn and spring, and mallards, pintails, shovelers, wigeon, three kinds of teal, a shelduck on the mudflats and whistling ducks over a dusk swamp fill the shallows and the reeds.

The diving and sea ducks keep to colder water: a harlequin on a wet rock above winter surf and a pair beside a mountain stream, common, king and spectacled eiders, a long tailed duck on a winter sea, a surf scoter on the swells, a goldeneye among floating ice, a bufflehead, a canvasback, a redhead, a ruddy duck, a smew and the hooded and common mergansers.

Snow geese cross a golden marsh in a short V and stand in falling snow, bar headed geese fly high over snowy peaks, brant rest on a winter coast and barnacle geese on a cliff ledge, with greylag, red breasted, emperor and white fronted geese.

Seen close are the webbed foot and bright wing patch of a mallard, the spoon shaped bill of a shoveler, two downy ducklings and the faces of a mute swan, a snow goose and a king eider. Nests of down and reeds hold their eggs, and the places stand empty at dawn, midnight and dusk: a cattail marsh at sunrise, a salt marsh, a wooded swamp, the summer tundra, a frozen lake, a beaver pond and a harvested field under early snow.

Short notes run through the book, on how waterfowl feed, nest and raise their young, how they fly and keep warm, and their long journeys north and south: the drake wood duck has a bright red eye and a long glossy crest swept back from its head, the drake pintail is named for its long, thin, pointed tail feathers, the shoveler sieves tiny food from the water through comb like edges on its broad bill, and the white fronted goose is named for the white band of feathers round the base of its bill.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.