Review: Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds

It used to be–and probably is no more–that the most telling insult one could offer to a bookish schoolchild was to spread the rumor that she spent her time “reading the dictionary.” It was never true, of course–actually reading a reference work is something only those charged with the writing of a book review would ever consider. Not even the most voracious, the most obsessive readers would think of consuming their encyclopedias and dictionaries and almanacs and atlases seriatim and at a single sitting.

“Reading” the dictionary, or the handsome and heavy Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds, for that matter, is instead a process of browsing, of letting one thing lead to the other, of following up the questions inevitably posed by the answers. And there are answers aplenty in the PEB, a splendidly illustrated reference to all the bird families of the world.

Organized taxonomically, the family entries are preceded by front matter comprising a general introduction to the anatomical unica that make a bird a bird; there is also a surprisingly, and probably inappropriately, specialized discussion of passerine classification.

The family accounts follow a standard pattern: paragraphs on “form and function” treat the physical adaptations characteristic of the taxon, and breeding behavior is treated at fascinating length for most groups.  Most of the bad news is concentrated at the end of the entries, where the conservation status of the family’s species is detailed. For particularly diverse or well-known groups, more precise information about distribution, diet, and general behavior is also provided. For users in a hurry, shaded boxes–”sidebars,” I suppose they’re called–briefly summarize the family’s nomenclature, species diversity, distribution and habitat, size range, nest and egg characteristics, diet, plumage and voice peculiarities, and conservation status; a small map depicts the family’s native range, and an amusing graphic compares a silhouetted representative with a human body part. Given this wealth of information, the curious browser can learn all about asities, mesites, and other relatively unfamiliar groups, and nearly every page reveals a tiny nugget of novelty somewhere.

The relevance of that novelty isn’t always immediately apparent. Among the dozens and hundreds of things to learn, we’re told in a photo caption that Mugimaki Flycatcher “is a far-eastern forest species whose name means ’sowing wheat’ in Japanese.” I’m entranced–but nowhere in the text is there so much as a speculation on why the bird should have such a name. Occasionally such mysterious utterances are simply wrong: sinensis Great Cormorants and Pygmy Cormorants are far from being “the family’s only true migrants.” But outright inaccuracy is rare in this book, and in the weeks it’s been on my shelf, I’ve used it a number of times as an authority to verify statements from other sources that seemed–and sometimes were–too outlandish even for birds.

The PEB is, if I understand correctly, a gently revised reprint of the second edition of the Firefly Encyclopedia. The text has been largely Americanized, though the occasional “aeroplane” seems to have slipped through; the use of “Stone Curlew” to refer to the family better known in the western hemisphere as thick-knees is also a bit of British palimpsest. I was disappointed to see that the revisions and updates did not extend to the list of contributors, many of whose institutional affiliations are now out of date and a few of whom, sadly, should have a dagger next to their name. The list also truncates Lester Short’s initials.

Any user spending time with this book will soon enough find its poor proofreading a source of annoyance. There are few outright misspellings (“retrices,” as on p. 22, always gets my goat), but it’s unfortunate that the first one–a missing hyphen in “spoon-billed”–should occur on the copyright page. Much more serious is the abysmal punctuation, which makes the text anything but a pleasure to read; the use of commas often seems to be merely decorative, and exclamation points show up in the strangest places.

Equally strange is the capitalization (or not) of bird names in the text. I do not belong to the camp of those who capitalize species names as “proper nouns”–but I have a lot of sympathy with the practice when (as in my b-log, come to think of it) it is intended to make scanning easier. All the same, lower-case species names don’t bother me at all, and the old chestnuts about not all yellow warblers’ being Yellow Warblers just don’t hold water (to mix a metaphor). It’s a fairly simple editorial decision–but one that wasn’t made here at all. Instead, it seems that the proofreader has decided to capitalize the first word of every species name and nothing more, giving us such weird artifacts as “Great blue herons” and “Cattle egrets.” Such forms are particularly risible in the case of long names: who would ever think to write “Southern rough-winged swallow”? And I really don’t know what to think of “Wood warbler.”

My complaints are serious, but they are not intended to detract from the great usefulness and the occasional pleasure of this book. It’s here that I learned that Marabous have hollow toes, and that Darwin’s rhea was discovered at the dinner table. Such gems would be the more accessible to the curious user if the book’s index allowed us to look them up using English species names instead of just the scientific names–a good discipline, I suppose, to be forced to learn them all, but surely it would have been easier to give the monolingual reader a page number than to chide her with a cross-reference.

Of course, it’s probably quicker, easier, and heaven knows lighter (all that glossy photo paper!) to look all these things up on the internet (where you can actually learn why the flycatcher is called “Mugimaki”); the days of printed encyclopedias are, inevitably, numbered. But until e-references are constructed in such a way that they can be not just consulted but browsed–even, I suppose, read, if you must–nothing can substitute for the chance to be led from one fascinating topic to the other, as this richly illustrated book does so well.