Brock’s Birds of Indiana

Traditionalists reject technology out of principle, Luddites out of fear. Me, I operate on ignorance: if I don’t know how to work it, and I don’t know what it’s going to do for me, then I don’t want anything to do with it. But if a new technotrick works, and if it gives me what I want with less effort than “the old ways,” then bring it on!

Indiana, blessed with coastline, deciduous forest, and the occasional remnant of prairie, has a state list that exceeds 400 species, and this new study by one of the state’s best-known birders treats them all in detail; fine photographs, most by 3 photographers, illustrate more than 100 species, both rarities and more familiar birds.

Birds of Indiana is presented as a number of pdf documents gathered into separate folders; all the documents can be downloaded onto a computer. The advantages of the digital format are largely economic; a book of this magnitude could well be prohibitively expensive, while the cd is quite modest in price. The disadvantage, of course, is that you can’t flip through even the most thoughtfully designed cd as easily as through a book. In the present case, navigation is awkward: no clickable table of contents or index, no through-pagination, no links between documents, and that annoying pdf ’skip’ from one page to the next all make using the documents a bit cumbersome at first.

The species accounts themselves contain a wealth of information, and will be of great use to anyone interested in the abundance and distribution of birds in the midwest. A brief description of each species’ historical status precedes lists of specimens and significant sight records; abundance information is given for each of the state’s major regions. Maps are provided for something less than half of the species discussed, while the seasonal occurrence of many migratory species is depicted in clear graphs. Graphs also show the changing abundance of many birds over the years; there are some happy surprises here, for example, the apparent long-term increase in Grasshopper Sparrow populations, along with unsurprising declines in other species.

Birds of Indiana includes records up through early 2006, making it in that respect one of the most up-to-date resources available for midwestern birds; for some reason, however, the taxonomy is current only as of the 2003 Supplement to the AOU Check-list. The records included are drawn from a vast array of published sources and databases; I was greatly interested by the author’s view of CBC and banding records, many of which turned out to be too imprecise to be of use in this study. All the same, more than 600,000 records were evaluated.

Brock’s Birds of Indiana will be a very useful resource to new and experienced birders in the midwest. Proceeds from the sale of the cd will be devoted in part to the conservation and education efforts of the Amos W. Butler Audubon Society, thus concretely helping the birds that are at the heart of this project.