I don't know that like is the right word for this, three star rating aside. It's certainly compelling, but usually on a horrifying level. Reischek was an Austrian taxidermist who spent years wandering around the backblocks of New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, collecting specimens for museums mostly. Those specimens were both biological and cultural, and this is a genuinely interesting account of his travels, particularly his interaction with Maori and his fascination with birdlife.

Oh, what he does to that birdlife. Shoots it as soon as looks at it, essentially, and the rarer it is the quicker he is to shoot. (At the end of his travels Reischek goes back to Austria, toting his collection, which includes hundreds and hundreds of extinct bird skins. Including more kakapo, stuffed into his trunks, than are alive today, and monstrous numbers of huia, now gone entirely. I want to strangle him.) It's the hypocrisy that gets to me. He spends so much time waxing lyrical about the ecology of the country he's pillaging, lamenting how it's being destroyed by careless exploitation. And for all his apparent good (if still racist) opinion of the Maori, he looks down at them for being so uncivilised as to trade mummified heads for gold while at the same time stealing corpses so that he can do the same. 37 skulls he takes back to Austria with him, amidst the mountain of dead birds, and hocks the lot to a museum. Apparently, it's different when he does it.