You find a single feather on the ground. What bird did it come from? This handbook is built to answer exactly that question, and it takes a different route than most feather guides: instead of sorting by species, it sorts by feather position — primaries, secondaries, then tail feathers — so you start with the shape in your hand and work toward color and pattern from there.
Roughly 130 species are covered across 144 pages, nearly double the 70 species in the publisher's earlier feather handbook, which this volume completely replaces. Each feather is marked with stars indicating how commonly it turns up in the field, giving beginners a sense of what they are most likely holding. Coverts and body feathers, which are notoriously hard to pin down, are gathered into a selective reference at the back. All feather images were captured by scanner rather than camera, so the outlines are sharp and the colors stay true — a real advantage when you are matching a specimen side by side with the page.
For collectors, there are dedicated columns on gathering, washing, and storing feathers, plus how to prepare proper specimens and what Japanese law says about picking feathers up. More unusual topics appear too, including humeral feathers and other regions rarely described in Japanese references, which will help if you read overseas literature. The author, Ryota Shintani, runs the Japanese edition of Feather Base, the world's largest online feather database, and supervised the second expanded edition of the life-size feather photo guide.
The text is in Japanese, but the scanned plates and position-based layout make visual matching straightforward. Published by Bun-ichi Sogo Shuppan. Brand new copy.
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