Learning Chef

Colophon

The animal on the cover of Learning Chef is a Wahlberg’s honeyguide, also known as a brown-backed honeybird (Protodiscus regulus).

The Wahlberg’s honeyguide is a small bird native to the thornveld and other mesic habitats of southern Africa. Inconspicuous and mostly residential, the honeyguide feeds primarily on scale insects and practices brood parasitism, in which offspring are smuggled into the broods of other birds—in this case, into the spherical nests of cisticolas and warblers—in order to spare the brood-parasite the investment of raising young.

This bird was given its name by Johan August Wahlberg, a Swedish naturalist who, during his travels in southern Africa between 1838 and 1856, also gave his name to a species of eagle, cormorant, fruit bat, frog, and tree. Wahlberg met his end near the Thamalakane river in modern-day Botswana in 1856, trampled by a wounded elephant. Wahlberg’s subsequent election to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science before news of his death could reach Sweden makes him the only member to have been elected posthumously.

Many of the animals on O’Reilly covers are endangered; all of them are important to the world. To learn more about how you can help, go to animals.oreilly.com.

The cover image is from Cassell’s Natural History. The cover fonts are URW Typewriter and Guardian Sans. The text font is Adobe Minion Pro; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu Mono.