Joseph M. Forshaw: Parrots of the World

A January day 20 years ago, Sandy Hook: We’re up to our knees in snow, shivering as we take turns admiring the juvenile Gyrfalcon through the scope. Suddenly, the brittleness of the cold air is broken by a cackling scream, and a long-tailed bird, blue and green, shoots over our heads and across the water to New York.

U.S. birders bird in the shadow of parrots: parrots past, parrots present, and parrots yet to come. I grew up in the historic range of Carolina Parakeet, and the ponderosa forests of the Chiricahuas are still haunted by memories of Thick-billed Parrots. Meanwhile, Peach-faced Lovebirds are an expected feature of every visit to Gilbert, and they’ve even appeared in downtown Tucson. And every once in a while, a budgy flies out the window, an amazon strikes out for freedom, or, as on that bitter-cold New Jersey day, a Blue-throated Conure risks it all for the chance at a better life on Staten Island.

For those of us in the northern portions of the northern hemisphere, it is those wanderers that make psittacid identification the vexing activity that it is; but the arboreal habits, cryptic plumages, and rapid flight of most parrots make it a challenge to distinguish many species even in their native ranges.

Now comes Joseph M. Forshaw, one of the most learned parrot experts in the world, with a new and lavishly illustrated identification guide from Princeton University Press, covering every species of parrot in the world, extant and otherwise. Birders (and, yes, ‘aviculturists’) with a special interest in these birds will certainly buy this book, if only for the fine paintings by Frank Knight (best known for his illustrations of Australian birds); the rest of us, I’m afraid, are faced with a difficult choice between this volume and the excellent identification guide in the Helm series by Tony Juniper and Mike Parr.

The Princeton guide comprises two text sections (one covering Old World species, the other the parrots of the New World) separated by 121 large-format color plates. Both physically and intellectually at the center of the book, these splendid paintings depict every parrot species and many distinctive subspecies; each is faced by a page providing identification and distribution information, usually accompanied by a large-scale range map. Knight’s paintings are extemely decorative (no surprise given the colorful plumages of most parrots), and for the few species I know reasonably well, extremely accurate; they are far superior to the images in Juniper and Parr, most of which appear to depict birds that have just waddled out of a lemon-juice bath, their feathers oddly ruffled and their expressions understandably cross.

Unfortunately, most of Knight’s paintings are labeled here only with the scientific names of the birds depicted (there are a few inexplicable exceptions where English names are provided as well). Even worse, the names are frequently abbreviated, making it difficult for all but the most knowledgable parrot experts to figure out at glance just what it is we’re looking at: the label “D.a. fuscifrons,” for example, isn’t much use to those of us who have not yet had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the evocatively named Hawk-headed Parrot. Readerly confusion turns to abject frustration on those plates (11, 60, 66, 69) where the facing captions are presented in an order different from the images: sloppy! Serious users of this book may wish to enter the English names themselves, marring the beauty of the plates but preventing some of the confusion that will otherwise prove inevitable.

Poor design also compromises the usefulness of the facing-page texts. Bold print is used for significant field marks, but the names of species are written in the same thin, fine capitals used for age classes and distributional information, making it very difficult for even the youngest eyes (not mine, alas!) to locate the correct taxon quickly. There are also no cross-references in the plates to the text sections of the book, making it necessary to resort to the index every time one wants to move between the images and the species accounts.

The species accounts suffer from the same lack of typographical care: the species names at the top of each account are actually smaller than the headers within the accounts, and the spacing is such that the brief summaries of generic characters seem to belong to the species that come before them rather than the species that follow. The information provided here is useful nonetheless, no matter how confusing its presentation. Distribution information, already provided in the captions to the plates, is repeated here, though not always in identical form: for example, the text states that Mexican Parrotlet ranges north only to southeastern Sinaloa, while the caption for that species’ plate correctly includes Sonora in its range. A welcome innovation is the inclusion of “suggested localities” where each species can profitably be sought.

The species accounts in Forshaw, though useful, are not as complete or as informative as those in Juniper and Parr (why do I keep wanting to add an “-ot” to the junior author’s name?). Taking, again, the Mexican Parrotlet as an example, J&P list one more alternative name than Forshaw, and their statements of range, habitat, and habits are considerably more detailed than those in the book under review here. Juniper and Parr also provide a more detailed description of the bird’s highly distinctive flight call, though neither they nor Forshaw manage to capture it well in syllabic transcription (it sounds to my ear rather like a “zheer, zheer” than either a “rolling kreeit” [Forshaw] or a “tinkling cree” [Juniper and Parr]). Juniper and Parr also offer better identification material, all of it available at a single place in the text rather than divided between text and image captions as in Forshaw.

Summa summarum: parrot fans will buy this book whatever I write here. Serious birders face a dilemma. Juniper and Parr is clearly the superior volume in the content and organization of its text, but the plates, by a number of artists, range, to my eye, from disconcerting to bad. The images in Forshaw’s book are uniformly outstanding, but they are coupled with a less comprehensive text and presented in a careless design. If the books had a similar format, I think that I would recommend buying both and having Knight’s paintings bound with the text of Juniper and Parr. An impractical solution, I suppose, and so I will stick with the Helm guide, pulling Forshaw from the shelf from time to time to admire its artwork.