Much motoring, walking, climbing, sitting, waiting, staring, wondering, deciding, writing, reading, persisting, and thus much time with much patience, much enthusiasm, were required for the determination behind this book – an announcement leaflet states it in part with “… twelve years of field work, two land-Rovers, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of bush roads, nine cameras and countless rolls of film”. All done while also country doctoring in general practice.

David Hollands’ determination was to have personal field experience of all the twenty-four endemic species of diurnal raptores in Australia, including photography, particularly of nesting behaviour, usually observed from a tower hide, and of flight.