http://blog.aba.org/2011/10/arlott-birds-of-north-america-and-greenland.html

http://blog.aba.org/2011/06/liguori-hawks-at-a-distance.html

Looking forward to using some of that new knowledge in New Jersey this fall!

There’s definite movement among the gulls of Vancouver this week. A California Gull was at Kitsilano Pool early this morning, and another adult was on the sewage ponds at Iona with three score Mew Gulls and 19 Thayer’s Gulls as the tide rose mid-day.

That taxon is named for John Eliot Thayer, who bankrolled the 1913 Alaska expedition that collected the first specimens. Maybe we’ll hear a little more more about him next year, the 150th anniversary of his birth–but I’ve been thinking about a different Thayer these past days.

You will have noticed all the attention being devoted to Richard Crossley’s impressive new ID Guide: for a month now, not a day has gone by without a glowing notice at one blog or another, and my own review seemed almost tardy when I “finally”–two days after receiving the book–posted it at the ABA blog.

Birders’ reactions so far (those reactions, that is to say, that have done more than just repeat the breathless jacket text) have concentrated on the guide’s plates, an entirely appropriate focus given the innovative nature of the illustrations in this book that so proudly “doesn’t like text.” And there have been some perceptive characterizations. Spencer, one of the most critically alert birders I know, has pointed out how the vitiation of perspective in the plates highlights the “constructedness” of identification texts, while several ‘bloggers’ have noticed that viewing these plates recalls the contemplation of Victorian dioramas. And not a few reviewers have compared Crossley’s photo montages to the work of Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

If all you know of Fuertes are the paintings in Pearson’s venerable Birds of America, then I suppose I can see it: there is a certain bustle to those images, particularly among the birds of prey, that anticipates in a distant way the cheek-to-jowl figures in Crossley’s plates. There is a faint stylistic echo, too, in the prominence with which the larger figures seize the foreground. But the source of each work’s pictorial density is very different: economic in the case of Birds of America, pedagogic in Crossley’s.

What many of the photographs in Crossley’s ID Guide do remind me of, and sometimes forcefully, is the work and the ideas of Abbott Thayer (no close relation, so far as I know, to John Eliot).

Look at Crossley’s owls, his grouse, his nightjars, his thrushes, and on and on, and you’ll find illustrations–literally–of the Thayerian principles of camouflage and obliteration almost as striking as the artist’s own.

abbott-thayer.blogspot.com

By the time of his death in 1921, Thayer’s theory that all coloration was ultimately and exclusively disruptive was largely dismissed as overstated and inflexible, and his influence on natural history illustration remained negligible at best for nine decades.

Maybe that’s changed now.

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.

Cui bono?

The Princeton Illustrated Checklists leave me more and more mystified. This newest volume, covering the passerines of virtually the entire Palearctic, is colorful and conveniently pocket-sized. But what good is it for the birder?

In his introductory paragraph, Arlott describes this book as intended as “a reminder of birds already seen and… a nudge towards what to look for” in searching for the unseen. But the book is unnecessary on the first count and unhelpful on the second. Anyone who has birded the areas covered here will already own and use some sort of checklist, printed or electronic. And the book provides essentially no information at all to help with the identification of birds new to the observer.

The 80 color plates cover up to a dozen species each, with some attention to geographic variation. Ten figures are devoted to the distinctive races of Yellow Wagtail, for example; unfortunately, Arlott appears to be unaware that that taxon is now thought to represent two separate species. The labels on some plates raise more questions than they answer: are the white-backed Terpsiphone on plate 39 truly “phases,” changing over time, or are they, as I suspect, actually morphs? The numbering of many figures is confusing, too; this is simply poor book design, and the beginner can be excused for calling his first Hooded Pitta an Eastern Phoebe.

Brief text sections face each plate, with information on identification, voice, and habitat. The identification sections, labeled “field notes,” are helplessly jejune, offering no assistance at all in distinguishing similar species. The author explains that “the illustrations will be all that is needed” for all but the ‘trickier’ species. He then provides us with nothing, no arrows, no captions, no telegraphic textual hints, to identify those more subtly distinguished birds.

Cui bono? Nemini, heu.