Reviews for Natural History of the Waterfowl

The average rating for Natural History of the Waterfowl based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-14 00:00:00 Darrell Oliver This is a really good book with "new" information (technically simply so far unpublished in our times) and interesting thoughts. There is information on diet, behavior (19th century information suggest a social animal), vocalization, captivity, repdroduction, extinction and human society at the time. Actually many things stated about the thylacine look similar to what is now claimed to be true about the Australian wild dog, except that so far scientists do not seem to be taking part in the myth making). The author did one hell of a job, but to be honest it might be possible that by that he will fall under the "great man" phenomenon he himself criticised because it lead to so much misinformation about the thylacine. I can definitely recommend that book for all its information and despite being 284 pages long it is for the most part easy to read. However, how much I like it, I cannot give it 5 stars due to 2 main points that made me wonder about the objectivity of the author: 1) He spends so much time on blaming scientists but doesn't seem to think general public to be responsible. Also the people scapegoating the thylacine don't seem to be blamed for its demise in the same degree that scientists are. His points are valid, but still it is odd, because I think he makes it look as though only scientists can be blamed as a group. 2) He just accepts that the dogs attacking sheep were feral despite the fact that he himself named incidences where dogs were set upon sheep by their owners to destroy flock of rivals and how owned dogs killed sheep. He also simply accepts that feral dogs mostly kill for pleasure due to their "domesticity." But the problem is that even at the time the book was written there had been studies and books available about feral dogs either having no contact with livestock or being only a nuisance and free-ranging owned dogs being the major attackers. So I think in this regard he is "guilty" of the same thing as the scientists who accepted blood-sucking and mass sheep-killing of sheep by thylacines. He basically takes popular mythology as granted.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-25 00:00:00 David Choi Excellent and exhaustively researched natural history of the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, extinct since 1936 (officially). Great chapters on what aboriginal people believed and their interactions with, the thylacine, and the wanton destruction perpetuated by the earliest colonists against the wolf-like marsupial over the last 100 years of the species' existence. Paddle has a lot more open mind than most writers of natural history and concedes that there was a South Australian population of thylacine as late as the 19th century.