Duplex Press

Hot New Title: Our Owls: Burrowing Owls in Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley

If you love Burrowing Owls, you’ll love this book.

Burrowing Owls are lovable, cute, adorable, so cool – that’s what people say when they see one. Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park is one of the very few places in the San Francisco Bay Area where you have a chance to see a Burrowing Owl — or maybe two or three — in an afternoon’s walk.

This book is packed with photographs backed by a narrative that draws on the scholarly literature about these rare and endangered birds. Chapters explore why we love them so much, where and when we can find them, what they eat and when the sleep and what they do when it rains, who are their friends and their foes, and how they and we fit into the bigger picture.

The author has taken more than 3,000 photos, published more than 350 blog posts and posted more than 250 YouTube videos about these birds, and is a leading advocate for their protection.

Available now via amazon.com. Paperback, hardcover, or Kindle. Soon also in your local East Bay bookstore.

Now Live on Amazon: Audubon’s Rifle: The story behind the making of Audubon’s bird paintings, drawn from Audubon’s own writings, revealing the path of destruction he and his friends left in the wilderness

People are mesmerized by Audubon’s bird paintings that show seemingly living birds in their habitat. Actually, almost every bird he painted was dead. Audubon shot it, and arranged its dead body on a wire rig to make it look alive. As he reports in his Ornithological Biography books, he shot not only the birds he needed for painting, but many more. He took pleasure in shooting large quantities of birds, and often did so. He shot birds for target practice. The sufferings of birds when shot, or their fierce resistance, left him unmoved. His books freely dispense advice on how to hunt and kill birds. He killed brooding birds, destroyed nests, and stole eggs.  He had trees chopped down to get nests. He killed hatchlings, fledglings, and young birds. He ate large numbers of birds and eggs of many species, including owls, eagles, woodpeckers, herons, Whooping Cranes, songbirds, and sandpipers. He preferred young birds because they were tastier. His own writings render Audubon unfit as a patron saint of bird conservation. His methods were so rapacious that even hunters could not adopt his name today.

Now available on amazon.com as a paperback or as a Kindle epub.