Love Life of the Birds

Features 24 color plates, all with tissue guards. Cloth-bound book in very good condition, with clean pages. Some wear to the spine and dust jacket.

From the inside front cover: "Love Life of the Birds' is a hymn to Nature. It portrays the loveliest of creatures in the culminating moment of their existence, when love exalts them, lends them dazzling personalities, inspires them to the impassioned ceremonies of courtship.

Observant philosopher, naturalist by art and vocation, Carlos Selva Andrade describes the nuptial customs of the birds, revealing the true depths of mating instincts and love play with laws as rigid and clear as those which rule human society.

The work combines sober science with lyric prose and word-pictures of strange and far-away places, an original approach which fulfills the author's purpose of inspiring a new love and understanding of the birds; in the end they become the closest to us of all living creatures.

To charge Axel Amuchastegui with illustrating "Love Life of the Birds" was to place the task in the hands of a painter of nature exceptionally fitted for the observation and portrayal of the most vital, lovely, and brilliant of creatures: the birds.

Ornithologist by vocation, Amuchastegui is above all an artist. He blends and balances perfectly the two extremes of documentation and decoration. His plates have moment and beauty. His birds live. They are alike for the delight of the aesthete and the edification of the naturalist. His settings–the stray branch, the wild flower, the land–are at once precise and pleasing, accurate representations of the places where his birds sing and nest. His talent, a modern revival of the schools of Audubon and Gould, captures every detail of plumage.