Historical accounts of Britain's global empire frequently overlook coastal outposts like Malta and Gibraltar, yet these territories played decisive roles in shaping the nature of Britain's sprawling overseas enterprise. As historical geographer Kirsten Greer asserts in Red Coats and Wild Birds, “The British Mediterranean was where British army officers started to think about ‘modern’ ideas of bird migration from Europe to Africa, as well as the boundary between the temperate (Europe) and tropical (Africa) worlds” (3–4).

Across six crisply written and lucidly composed chapters, Greer demonstrates the centrality of field ornithology to the intertwined ventures of imperial geography and colonial science. The British armed forces practiced a “sporting zoology” in regions that were otherwise off limits to ordinary travelers and naturalists. Officer-naturalists charted the contours of empire through the prism of “zoogeography—a branch of biogeography concerned with the distribution of animal species across the globe” (7). As Greer establishes, such scientific disciplines were not ideologically neutral; the knowledge generated by their practitioners often ended up justifying territorial expansions, informing resource exploitation, and validating colonial conservation practices that profoundly altered local cultures and environments.

The book revolves around the biographies of four nineteenth-century British military officers who were also bird enthusiasts: Thomas Wright Blakiston (Royal Artillery), Andrew Leith Adams (64th and 22nd Regiments), Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby (90th and 74th Regiments), and Philip Savile Grey Reid (Royal Engineers). Greer juxtaposes the stories of these officer-naturalists with accounts of the migratory birds that they followed and collected. In her view, avian species from the Mediterranean region—ranging from great bustards (Otis tarda) and hoopoes (Upupa epops) to golden orioles (Oriolus oriolus) and ospreys (Pandion haliaetus)—were actors in their own right, shaping dimensions and representations of British power. Greer uses this platform to launch broader discussions of how gender, class, and whiteness acquired new meanings in the context of the human cultures and environments of imperial flyways. Themes of transience, mobility, and circulation play key roles in Greer's portrayal of the spaces that were shaped and reconfigured from above by migratory birds and from below by the field officers who pursued them.

In a compelling afterword, Greer brings her historical research into conversation with contemporary debates over bird hunting and bird protection in Malta, thereby complicating ongoing portrayals of “moral” British birdwatchers and “savage” Maltese pothunters. Here, as on so many other occasions, Greer manages to “get under the skin” of empire—or, perhaps, under its feathers—to probe its inner logic and parse its long-term legacies.

The book is a revised doctoral dissertation, so it can, at times, read like a parade of salutations to the thinkers who have influenced its author. Many of the pages in Red Coats and Wild Birds abound with concepts-du-jour and buzzwords set off in quotation marks. Without constant recourse to the citations, it can be difficult to disentangle the points where Greer is innovating from the places where she is relying on other scholars’ terms and notions. The following sentences from the first chapter exemplify this tendency: “These interventions help to conceive the stuffed bird specimens in my study not as ‘discrete entities’ but as material forms ‘bound into continual cycles of articulations and disarticulation’ that have the potential to reveal other histories, which include the ‘lived culture’ of the animals in question” (13). Greer is a very talented writer and an immensely capable thinker; her editor should have encouraged her to trust the power of her own authorial voice.

This minor quibble aside, Red Coats and Wild Birds is a fascinating study by a scholar whose work will undoubtedly influence our perceptions of the British Empire. Among Greer's many innovations is her convincing expansion of what she calls the “avian imperial archive” (12). By transcending the limits of textual sources and venturing deep into the realm of material culture, she greatly magnifies her (and our) analytical reach. Greer's stories are replete with the paraphernalia of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities; stuffed bird specimens, feathers, eggs, nests, sketchbooks, cameras, and field journals cover every available surface. Yet Red Coats and Wild Birds does not exhibit the forlorn patina of a neglected museum case. Instead, Greer's lively prose and fresh ideas keep readers aloft for the duration of a colorful journey across the British Empire.