Birders of Africa: History of a NetworkBirders of Africa: History of a Networkby Nancy J. Jacobs. 2016. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, USA. xiii + 325 pp., 16 color plates (a subset of the 48 black-and-white text figures). $85 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-300-20961-7.

Birders of Africa: History of a Network by Nancy J. Jacobs. 2016. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, USA. xiii þ 325 pp., 16 color plates (a subset of the 48 black-and-white text figures). $85 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-300-20961-7. This volume chronicles how Africa’s birds came to be known. Nancy Jacobs recognizes three distinct types of bird knowledge—vernacular, ornithological, and recreational—and weaves a complex tale of how they have developed and interacted through her ‘‘network’’ of birders. She adopts Ted Eubanks’s refreshingly broad view of birders as people who ‘‘find their way to nature through birds,’’ and takes this to include anyone who observes birds, even if it’s only to better hunt them or keep them from one’s crops. I suspect that many ‘‘traditional’’ birders would bridle at calling such consumptive/combative relationships ‘‘birding,’’ but Jacobs uses this premise to argue that most rural people are birders. A central question of the book is how colonial ‘‘ornithologists’’ interacted with—and exploited to varying degrees— Africans who possessed vernacular knowledge of the region’s birds. This question is addressed mainly through the lens of southern and central Africa. There is little mention of the exploration of birds in Francophone or Portuguese Africa, or in the Abyssinian region. Jacobs explains this bias in terms of the much richer archival tradition in the former British colonies, but, at least in the first half of the book, the focus on the south strikes me as deliberate, for it was there that the arrival of seafaring Europeans in the 16th century had the greatest impact on local communities. The wide-ranging Introduction outlines the author’s approach to her diverse and challenging subject. It is followed by two sections, each containing four chapters. Chapter 1 deals with vernacular birding knowledge in Africa, starting from precolonial times. It provides a wealth of interesting anecdotes about the roles ascribed to birds in traditional beliefs, although some details are confused (e.g., the ‘‘predatory unomyayi’’ [Cape crow] is referred to as ‘‘European rook’’). Several stories are related to mythological ‘‘birds,’’ but Jacobs is not concerned about objective veracity; to her, an interest in birds (in the broadest sense) qualifies as knowledge. Chapter 2 considers the earliest contacts between the Dutch and various indigenous peoples found at the Cape. Here, Jacobs has little material with which to work; there is more on the transfer of knowledge about plants than about birds, and many of the author’s inferences are based on the interactions of Dutch physician–botanists with people in Asia rather than in Africa. Chapter 3 describes the development of ornithology in southern Africa from 1700 to 1900. It is here that Jacobs clearly espouses her