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.

 

One could argue that birding in the western hemisphere started on Hispaniola, with the colorful birds captured by Columbus’s men as trophies of their voyage. Today, more than five centuries later, this Caribbean island and the two nations that share it, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, are the subject of renewed interest in the birding community; Hispaniola now has its own eBird (at http://www.ebird.org/Hispaniola/) and its own field guide, a handsome, easy-to-use volume available in English, Spanish, and French.

And just in time. No fewer than 38 of Hispaniola’s 306 avian species are endangered, among them fully 15 of the island’s 31 endemics. Habitat loss and degradation are to blame; the authors also cite failure to enforce environmental laws and a lack of local knowledge of the island’s biodiversity and its importance. The ultimate goal of Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti is to “inspire a new generation of birdwatchers, ornithologists, and conservationists” to “become as fascinated as we are by the diversity of the island’s avifauna.” The guide has a good chance to do just that.

BDRH adheres to the familiar format of color plates with facing-page identification notes, followed by a more expansive text offering a detailed description, distinctions from similar species, a voice description, detailed status and distribution information for Hispaniola, and miscellaneous comments. Each species account is accompanied by a range map, and local names (in Spanish for the Dominican Republic, in Creole and in French for Haiti) are also provided.

These longer texts are generally adequate for the identification of all but the most subtly distinguished species, and will likely serve both visitors to Hispaniola and local birders well. The “Comments” sections are often thorough, concise explorations of the more interesting aspects of a species’ life history or conservation status. Only occasionally do the species accounts leave important questions unanswered: we are told, for example, that the West Indian forms of the Short-eared Owl differ from North American birds ”in plumage and vocalizations,” but regrettably, no details are offered about those distinctions. The presentation of additional taxonomic information is generally clear and thorough, but the comment in the account for Hispaniolan Crossbill is befuddling: the authors write of “this crossbill” as “a species typical of northern coniferous forests,” and note that it was “considered part of the White-winged Crossbill species complex” until 2003. It would have been more accurate, and thus necessarily less confusing, to write that the Hispaniolan Crossbill was long considered conspecific with the White-winged Crossbill, but was recognized as a separate species in 2003.

The front of the book is rather less satisfying. The color plates (many borrowed from Princeton’s West Indies) range from adequate to poor. Hispaniolan endemics are depicted in full-page portraits by Barry Kent McKay; these images are dramatic and decorative, but particularly in the case of those species presenting identification challenges, a more traditional field-guide format, showing the birds against a plain background and in profile, might have been more helpful. Unfortunately, the tails and bills of some of McKay’s birds are cut off in my review copy.  

The telegraphic identification texts facing the plates are generally quite good. Occasionally, though, the text emphasizes a field mark not visible in the facing image; for example, the strong white primary fringing described for Stolid Flycatcher cannot be seen on the plate. (This problem is shared with the plate in Raffaele et al., where the text speaks of “primaries” but arrows point to the strong white fringing of the bird’s tertials.) Conversely, some images show features useful for identification that are not addressed in the text; the different face patterns of Tree and Golden Swallows, clearly depicted but unmentioned, are an example. The scale on many plates is off as well, making a Song Sparrow as long as a Rose-breasted Grosbeak.

Most troubling perhaps is the topography sketch in the field guide’s front matter. Not only is the drawing (of a Hispaniolan Spindalis) misshapen, but a number of the labels are incorrect: the “secondaries” are actually tertials, the “malar” actually the throat, the “legs” actually the tarsus (or tarsometatarsus, as long as I’m being picky), and the “chest”–well, I don’t know what that is. This is a disservice to the new and potential birders the guide hopes to attract, and should be corrected in any subsequent printings of the book.

The weakness of the illustrations, though, is far outweighed by the usefulness of the text, and by the value of the book as a whole. Let us hope that its goal is realized, and that the residents of Hispaniola come to recognize the beautiful diversity of their avifauna before it is too late.

 

 

I came long ago to be suspicious of the encyclopedic impulse, the naive notion that knowledge could be captured and condensed in its entirety in a way that would not reduce its value. Encyclopedias of birds, birding, birdlife, whatever they are called, seem particularly susceptible to superficiality, and browsing most of them gives me what we used to call the willies.

Not so the new edition of Christopher Leahy’s Birdwatcher’s Companion, which in spite of its geeky title is as much fun to read as it is informative, even (get this!) accurate. From “abbreviations” to “zygodactyl,” by way of “imagination,” “rodent-run,” and “Teratornis,” the articles in the Companion cover a nearly overwhelming range of topics in ornithology, birding, history, and culture, all presented in an engaging and easy style. Leahy wears his considerable erudition lightly, and even the most casual reader will laugh out loud at the wit that shines through in sometimes the least expected places.

But the Companion is not likely to find many casual readers. Grabbing the thick, sturdy volume from the shelf, one may well intend only to check on the correct pronunciation of “Botteri” (accent on the first syllable, please) or the top speed of the Peregrine (verified at “only” 82 mph); but the book is seductive, and it will suck even the most single-minded user in with its recipes for American Coot, its mildly X-rated etymology of the word “stork,” its musings on the color “hepatic.” One topic suggests another, and one clearly and engagingly written article leads inexorably to “just one more,” until one is no longer consulting the book but reading it. The fine illustrations by Gordon Morrison are equally appealing, and range from plans for a Wood Duck box to the skeleton of a Northern Gannet.

The Companion first appeared 25 years ago, mirabile dictu, but the new edition, recently released in paperback, represents a thorough revision, many articles added and many others completely rewritten. While typographical errors are quite frequent, more substantive lapses are scarce (though oddly concentrated: the poor alcids fare particularly badly, for some reason, with the Long-billed Murrelet styled “Long-tailed,” the nesting sites of Ancient Murrelets moved high into the trees, and the length of the largest auks given as an intimidating 62 inches). Such slip-ups are, I am sure, only rarely the author’s fault.

Ned Brinkley’s gracious and graceful Introduction sings the praises of this book as a guide and a gift for the non-birder. I could not agree more; but birders too, no matter how inexperienced, no matter how sophisticated, will be charmed, amused, and educated by what is not just a reference book, but in the truest sense of the word a companion.     

The question was posed some years ago in the letters column of Birding magazine: which is better, birding or sex? Myself, I think the answer is obvious, but others have disagreed. What is 100% certain is that one of these popular hobbies is older than the other: Adam named the creatures of the earth quite some time before he even noticed Eve’s considerable allures.

Things went downhill from that point, bottoming out at Babel, where the Edenic ur-language splintered into a thousand vernaculars. Adam’s original names went out the tower window, and we birders have been struggling ever since: is that cute little short-tailed nightjar a Buff-collared, a Tucuchillo, a Cookachea, or a Ridgway’s Whip-poor-will? And how on earth do we spell “whippoorwill” anyway?

A century and a quarter ago, the American Ornithologists’ Union made its first attempt at restoring the prelapsarian order, standardizing the English and scientific names of the birds of the US and Canada; now in its seventh edition, and having benefited from some 47 supplements over the years, the quaintly spelled Check-list has extended its taxonomic dominion as far south as Panama, providing authoritative, if not always uncontroversial, names for 2,041 birds.

But what about the rest of the world, and the 80% of the world’s birds that do not occur in the Nearctic? Over the years, Peters, Sibley and Monroe, Clements, and Howard and Moore have all offered elaborate lists of the birds of the world, and ambitious international birders have relied on an often idiosyncratic synthesis of these sources in determining what to count and what to call it. But those lists were primarily taxonomic, not nomenclatural, in intent, and none had as its primary goal the generation of a list of standard names. World birders have struggled to stay afloat in a swirling sea of polylexy and polysemy, where one bird may have many names and one name may apply to many birds.

Fifteen years ago, the International Ornithological Congress determined to create a “set of unique English-language names for the extant species of the birds of the world…based on consensus and a logical set of rules.” The result is presented in a newly published book and cd from Princeton University Press, under the nominal authorship of the noted ornithologist Frank Gill and the world lister Minturn Wright. Six subcommittees, chaired by regional experts, prepared lists of recommended names, which were then collated, re-negotiated, and accepted by the working committee as a whole.

“Pedantry,” of course, is the first and one of the kindest words to spring to mind, but the authors argue valiantly that their list “will lead to success in ornithology” by making it possible for ’stakeholders’ around the world to communicate clearly and without confusion. At the same time, they admit that widespread adoption of the names recommended here is likely to be “piecemeal” and a long time coming.

The list of names itself occupies exactly 200 pages, and is preceded by a short introduction laying out the problems in creating such a list and the principles invoked in solving them.

I was pleased to see among the statements of principle that all names would be unique, that is to say, that no species would have more than one name and that no name would refer to more than one species. It would have been difficult but not impossible to extend this admirable principle to taxa above the level of species, avoiding such potential confusions as having both parrots and hummingbirds named “racket-tail” or mimids and bowerbirds called “catbird.”

All the recommended names are to be English, and any names of foreign origin would be anglicized, with no attempt to maintain their “original” character with such contrivances as glottal stops and accents; the umlaut, however, is retained on patronyms. Unfortunately, the committee did not carry its resolve through in the case of Hawaiian endemics, many of which are here given weakly anglicized versions of native names, a frustrating and pointless nod in the direction of some sort of political correctness (we don’t call the Corsican Nuthatch “Picchio muratore corso”!).

Equally odd is the treatment of some toponyms within bird names: those deemed “offensive to a substantial group of people” were changed (Formosa becomes Taiwan, for example), while those the committee thought inoffensive have been left as they are. “Burma,” for example, is retained over the country’s official English name of Myanmar. It would have been simpler, I believe, to insist on consistency here, and to use the modern names of geographic entities wherever possible.

Spelling issues receive special attention. The recommended names are treated as if proper nouns, and thus capitalized in print; there is no logical or linguistic reason behind this, but the convention does make scanning easier for the hurried reader. The possessive -s is retained on patronyms. And hyphens….

Americans of the generation following mine (well, generations now, as middle age rushes in on me) badly overuse hyphens, making a page of prose look way too Teutonic for my tastes. In general, the principles set forth here are conservative and easily followed. Compound names that end in “-bird” (”Bluebird”) or that are echoic (”Dickcissel”) are written as a single word, unless the name “would be hard to pronounce or would look odd” (!). “Whip-poor-will” keeps its crop of hyphens, apparently on that last criterion; “Laughingthrush,” on the other hand, bane of spell checkers and typesetters, maintains its row of five consonants, and “Woodswallow,” which I continually mispronounce, is left as one word.

The authors note that hyphenation within compound names quickly “became the single most contentious point in the entire project.” Fifteen years later, the general rule that has emerged is that hyphens should generally not be used, leaving us with “Screech Owls” and “Storm Petrels,” among other names that are consistently hyphenated in the AOU Check-list. Where both components are a bird name, as in “Hawk-Owl,” a hyphen is to be used; here, too, the AOU takes just the opposite position, naming our bird “Northern Hawk Owl.” If the second element in the name refers to a taxon that does not include the bird in question, that element is to be written lowercase: for example, a Silky-flycatcher is not a flycatcher, but a Tody-Flycatcher is.

Consistency is a slippery goal, of course, and the rules in the Introduction admit of any number of exceptions to avoid “offense” and violations of “usage” or “common sense.” And exceptions abound, some of them justified, others not.

Rule 5.B.3, which requires a hyphen in compound names comprising two bird names, appears not to have been applied to “Magpie Goose” or to “Crane Hawk.” The n of “Owlet-Nightjar” should be lowercase, according to Rule 5.B.4; “Shrike-Vireo” is a doubtful case, but the passerids known as “Sparrow-Weavers” should certainly have a small w.

More interesting than the occasional inconsistency are those instances where the committee members have taken it upon themselves to introduce stability by altering some names of long standing. To prevent polysemy, where one name refers to more than one species, the list adds the modifier “American” to the birds known in the AOU Check-list as “Cliff Swallow” and “White Ibis.” The AOU’s Black-headed Gull here becomes (again!) “Common Black-headed Gull,” with an eye to avoiding possible confusion with the Great Black-headed Gull (which is now more widely known as “Pallas’s Gull” in any event). The Rock Pigeon, a name that still refuses to trip off the tongue, is styled “Common Pigeon,” and North America’s Common Raven is more eloquently listed here as “Northern Raven,” a name it has borne before in its nomenclatural past. The Myioborus redstarts are listed here as “Whitestarts,” a change already made in most field guides to the Neotropics. And the unwieldy names burdening the orange-faced Ammodramus in the AOU Check-list are replaced by the elegant and simple “Nelson’s Sparrow” and “Saltmarsh Sparrow” (for which thanks!).

The names on this list are “English” names, but it must be recalled that English is a language spoken in many places–and in many ways. Where British and North American (or British and US) usage conflict, the committee’s choices have been eclectic, sometimes opting for the Old World preference, sometimes for the name in use in North America, and sometimes combining the two: the gaviids are all known as “Loons,” but the most widespread species is listed as “Great Northern Loon.” We have the British-style “Grey Plover” alongside the American “Red Phalarope,” and if we have to call our Bank Swallow “Sand Martin,” then at least they are going to have get used to calling out “Long-tailed Bushtit”! The spelling “grey” is incongruous in the names of such North American endemics as Grey (!) Jay.

Although the list is intended as a purely nomenclatural document, some of these interventions have taxonomic implications. Where Parasitic and Long-tailed Jaegers are allowed to keep the names familiar to North American birders, Pomarine becomes “Pomarine Skua,” in line with British usage and with recent research suggesting its greater affinity to the “bonxie” skuas. The slender North American phalacrocoracids have become “Pelagic Shag” and “Red-faced Shag.” Lucifer Hummingbird is called “Lucifer Sheartail,” reflecting its close affinity to the tropical sheartails, and our Blue-throated Hummingbird is made a “Mountaingem” for similar reasons. Unfortunately, the bustard/korhaan divide is not aligned with the genera involved, and it is utterly unclear why Clay-colored Robin has become a “Thrush” but Rufous-backed should remain a “Robin.”

The list proper is followed by a beautifully laid-out index of species names, both English and scientific. A cd tucked inside the back cover provides Excel files containing the complete list of 10,068 species, along with more extensive range information than could be provided in the printed text.

The printed list and these downloadable files are a spectacularly useful resource for anyone who writes, reads, or thinks about birds outside of his or her own region. Minor inconsistencies are inevitable in a project of this enormous reach, and the committee and the editors are to be congratulated for producing a useful and useable work.