This is a fully revised and updated new version of a popular RSPB handbook to the art and joy of drawing birds. John Busby beautifully conveys his own remarkable ability to capture the grace and motion of living birds, illustrating his ideas and suggestions with many examples of his own work. He also uses illustrations from over 45 other talented bird artists to demonstrate a variety of principles and techniques. The text covers a wealth of topics, including choice of media, sketching from life, composition and different ways of interpreting the subject matter. This is a beautiful and inspiring book which will appeal to aspiring artists and anyone who has ever been entranced by the beauty of birds.

Fieldworkers’ notebooks are full of sensations and observations in which the subjectivity of the ethnographer seeps through. Not really science. Much closer to life. Yet in classical anthropology they are invisible to the reader. In this book the focus is reversed, turning Anthropology Inside Out as it explores the vibrant backstage life of field notes. What happens when we put them centre stage? Aimed at both curious novice and experienced practitioner, the chapters read as a catalogue of experimental practices teetering on the edge of the tradition: intuitively observational drawings; notes pervaded with paranoia; collective notetaking;crisis-ridden personal confessions; layers of notes in photographs and archives; old flip-flops that trigger memories in mind and body. This exploration of what field notes are, can do and could be, concludes with a constellation of shimmering notes on notes from Michael Taussig, a meta-commentary on anthropologists’ fetishistic relationship with the most personal of professional tools.