Ducks

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Ducks is probably best described as an ideal coffee-table book for any
North American birder.

It consists of five chapters on various aspects of duck lore written
for a serious-minded but nonspecialist and nontechnical readership.
These essays are punctuated by 67 superb color photographs of some 30
species of North American duck, all but three of which (spectacled eider
and two species of whistling duck) are on the official Canadian list.

This is a book that celebrates the beauty of ducks as well as their
behavior and the environmental aspects relating to them. Several of the
photographs are of mallard, and thereby illustrate a point that has
often occurred to me: that, if it were not one of the commonest of
birds, it would surely have been acknowledged long ago as one of the
most stunningly beautiful ducks in the world.

I have just one reservation about this splendidly produced book. Good
as David Jones’s text is, it is outshone by the photography, yet the
names of the photographers are absent from both cover and title page.
Indeed, one has to turn to the last page for the decidedly meagre photo
credits. All in all, however, Ducks is a book to cherish.