Coffee Table Book of: Parrots (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Parrots is a large format book of parrots, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: macaws, cockatoos, grey parrots, conures, lorikeets and many more, their faces, crests, feet and feathers seen close, their nests in hollows, cliffs and sticks, and the forests, swamps, mountains and dry plains where they live, at many hours and in every season.

Cockatoos fill the dry country: a sulphur crested cockatoo on a dead tree at sunset, galahs at dusk, little corellas at a waterhole, a pink cockatoo with its banded crest raised, a red tailed black cockatoo in flight, a yellow tailed black cockatoo tearing at a pine cone, a glossy black cockatoo by a still lake, a gang gang cockatoo on a frosty morning and cockatiels on the open grassland.

Grey parrots perch at the edge of a misty clearing and fly low over its pools, stocky green parrots with yellow, blue and red faces sit in dry forest, and sun, golden, jenday and nanday conures, lorikeets at gum blossom, the burrowing parrot of the dry steppe, the kea of the snowy mountains, the flightless kakapo of the night forest, eclectus parrots, lovebirds, budgerigars and a hanging parrot asleep upside down complete the family.

Seen close are a scarlet macaw’s ivory bill, a hyacinth macaw’s yellow eye ring, the lined face of a blue and yellow macaw, a raised yellow crest, the red cheek of a palm cockatoo, the red and blue ruff of a hawk headed parrot and a foot with two toes forward and two back.

Short notes run through the book, on how parrots feed, nest and raise their young, how their feathers get their colours, and the many kinds of parrot alive today: the scarlet macaw’s upper bill is mostly pale ivory, while its lower bill is black, the monk parakeet is the only parrot that builds a nest of sticks instead of using a hollow, only the male gang gang cockatoo has a red head; the female’s head is grey, and hanging parrots sleep hanging upside down from a twig, like small green bats.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.