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Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing Bird, by Mark Jerome Walters, University Press of Florida, 2021, hardcover, 176 pages, $24.95.

I would recommend this book on the strength of the prologue alone. In just seven brilliant pages, author Mark Jerome Walters covers the evolutionary history of birds from dinosaurs to the present, focusing on the line that led to corvids, then to jays, then to the titular species, Florida Scrub-Jay. Explaining how the bird became separated over time from other scrub-jays, Walters notes that “it’s a double miracle that the bird survives at