Birds of the West Indies

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Cover of Birds of the West Indies

Birds of the West Indies (ISBN 0-618-00210-3) is a book containing exhaustive coverage of the 400+ species of birds found in the Caribbean Sea, excluding the ABC islands, and Trinidad and Tobago, which are considered bio-geographically as part of South America.

Written by ornithologist James Bond and first published in 1936 by the Academy of Natural Sciences as part of the International Series. It has been reprinted several times since then, including a September 1, 1999 edition from Houghton Mifflin and a March 4, 2002 edition from Collins. The book contains approximately 256 pages.

The book was the only text exclusively devoted to the avifauna of the region for many decades until A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies (ISBN 0-691-08736-9), by Herbert Raffaele et al., was published in 1998.

[edit] James Bond

Birds of the West Indies is known not only for its exhaustive study of Caribbean birds, but also for its author, the namesake of Agent 007 of Her Majesty's Secret Service. The book's author, James Bond, was used by Ian Fleming for the name of his popular British secret agent, Commander James Bond.

Fleming, a keen bird watcher while living at his estate in Jamaica, owned the book. He later explained that the author's name was "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon, and yet very masculine - just what I needed." The book has since become a collector's item amongst Bond fans and was featured as an homage in the twentieth James Bond film, Die Another Day when Bond poses as an ornithologist while in Cuba.