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Fathers and Sons

A review by Rick Wright

Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology, by Edward H. Burtt, Jr., and William E. Davis, Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2013

444 pages, $35.00—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13883

Audubon's Aviary: The Original Watercolors for the Birds of America, by Roberta J.M. Olson

Skira Rizzoli, 2012

448 pages, $85.00—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13733

Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon met exactly twice. It didn’t go especially well either time.

In 1810, Wilson tried and failed to enlist the younger man as a subscriber to his American Ornithology. Some time on, Audubon looked his colleague up in Philadelphia; he would later write, famously, that Wilson

received me with civility…. [but] Mr Wilson spoke not of birds or drawings. Feeling, as I was forced to do, that my company was not agreeable, I parted from him; and after that I never saw him again.  

Wilson was dead not long thereafter, the victim at age 47 of overwork and dysentery. Audubon survived him by nearly 40 years, never entirely out of the shadow of the man whose posthumous advocates called him the “Father of American Ornithology.”

This summer, the two are reunited in memory. The year 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the death of Wilson, on August 23, 1813, and the 150th anniversary of the New-York Historical Society’s acquisition, in July 1863, of Audubon’s 435 original watercolors for the Birds of America. Each of those occasions has now been commemorated in the publication of a book, both titles making available invaluable new material for the study of two of North America’s most important ornithologists.  

Alexander Wilson is hardly more than a name to most of us, the dimly recalled eponym of a handful of birds and a venerable ornithological society. That should change with the publication of Burtt and Davis’s handsome Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology.

That title somewhat misleadingly suggests that this is another in the long series of Wilson biographies that began to appear immediately after his death and have continued to be published at regular intervals up to our day. This new Wilson does include a fifty-page biographical précis, along with brief prose sketches describing Wilson’s science and its legacy; those chapters will be of interest chiefly to readers who come fresh to Wilson and the history of North American ornithology. 

But it is the pictorial material that makes this new book stand out from all its predecessors. Following a short introduction to the technical aspects of the production and publication of Wilson’s work, Burtt and Davis devote some 195 pages to color reproductions of the extant sketches, drawings, and paintings Wilson produced in preparation for his American Ornithology. Those images, never before gathered into a single volume and many of them previously unpublished, range from simple pencil outlines to fully finished watercolor paintings. Many of the surviving images were cut out to be combined with other figures on a single plate of the finished work, and some still show rusty smears of the iron oxide used in transferring Wilson’s drawings to the copper plate for engraving.

The authors annotate each image with an abbreviated taxonomic history, a brief commentary “on outstanding or unusual artistic and biological aspects of the portrait,” and, in most cases, an excerpt from Wilson’s own account of the species.

Each bird is identified by its present English and scientific names, its “original” binomial, and the names used by Wilson in the American Ornithology. Some errors and imprecisions are introduced here: the current scientific name of the Summer Tanager, for example, is correctly Piranga rubra (Linnaeus), not Tangara œstiva. Even where they are correct, those older synonyms, unaccompanied by any bibliographic details, are of only questionable use to the reader, who would have been much better served had they simply been replaced with a clear reference to the corresponding text and plate in American Ornithology. As it stands, the reader interested in comparing Wilson’s drawings with the finished plates must visit the end notes for a citation to the text of the American Ornithology, then consult that work (for most of us, on line) to determine which plate illustrates a given species—a tangled procedure that few readers are likely to put themselves through.

Names are among the subjects that Burtt and Davis address in their brief commentaries. We learn, for example, that George Robert Gray (identified here only as “Gray”) was honoring Wilson’s wishes when he named the pink and black woodpecker of the West Picus Lewis, and that it was the War of 1812 that kept Wilson from learning of Bechstein’s scant priority in the naming of the Upland Sandpiper. Burtt and Davis also provide tentative identifications of some of Wilson’s “nonce species,” and note those cases, such as that of the plumages of the Orchard Oriole, where Wilson was able to unravel the confusion of his colleagues. The authors likewise comment on the scientific accuracy and artistic attainment of several of the drawings, singling out for particular praise in both spheres Wilson’s Night Hawk, one of the artist’s

best efforts. The pose of the upper bird shows fully the distribution of white on the wings and tail that is important in the bird’s identification. The very effective texture to this fully painted work was achieved by applying opaque watercolors over wash.

At the same time, Burtt and Davis acknowledge the uneven quality of the Wilsonian œuvre that still troubles us today. In his preliminary drawings of turnstones, knots, and Dunlin, for example, Wilson’s treatment of the eyes creates “a stuck-on, glass-eyed appearance.”

The excerpts reproduced here from the text of the American Ornithology include some familiar and memorable passages. Others are less gripping. Why, for instance, are we given Wilson’s description of the Carolina Parakeet’s feet rather than his bizarre disquisition on the toxicity of its gut? Does Wilson really tell us nothing more interesting about the Osprey than its use of mullein stalks and dry spartina in the nest? Surely the entire opening given over to Wilson’s notes on the soft part colors of herons could have been devoted to more informative, or even just more entertaining, material.

As valuable and as enjoyable as these images are, they would have been made much more so by a more logical presentation than they are given here. I find no explanation in Burtt and Davis’s text of the sequence they have imposed on the drawings; the endnotes suggest an order roughly—and only imperfectly—equivalent to that in the American Ornithology. Much leafing and flipping would have been avoided by reproducing the images in taxonomic sequence (whether Wilson’s or today’s), or even in alphabetical order—or, best of all, organized along the five “themes” set forth in Chapter One and then barely mentioned in the rest of the book.

A more consistent layout would also have made using the images and the accompanying texts easier. While the first three species are treated in a clear, straightforward way, with the image on a verso page and texts on the facing recto, the design quickly falls apart, with images, synonymies, commentaries, and Wilsonian excerpts flowing pell-mell across the pages, creating more widows and orphans than a Nova Scotia iceberg. It too often requires considerable attention and not a little page-turning to take full advantage of the image and the supplementary information the authors provide.

Not that the effort isn’t worth it. Wilson presents priceless insights into the work and the process of a man too little known and too little regarded today, and this book is likely to go a long ways towards restoring Wilson to his rightful place among this country’s most important early ornithologists.

If Wilson is too obscure, Audubon is too much a household name. Insurance company calendars, coffee mugs, cell phone covers: It never ends, no doubt greatly to the posthumous satisfaction of the American Woodsman.

The unavoidable ubiquity of all things Audubonian has made it hard for many of us to properly appreciate the man’s accomplishments. Indeed, it’s fashionable now—as it was in the 1830s—in some circles to dismiss Audubon as good enough for hoi polloi, and beneath serious notice for the rest of us.

That’s unfair, but it's understandable, given that most of us “know” Audubon only through the engravings published between 1827 and 1838 as The Birds of America. Striking (and expensive) as they are, those plates are more admirable than they are beautiful, triumphs of printing technology and Audubon’s entrepreneurial spirit, decorative rather than artistic.

Audubon’s Aviary, the wonderful companion volume to the New-York Historical Society’s three-part exhibition under the same title, lets us change our minds about Audubon and his accomplishments as a painter—or at least it changed mine. Presenting all 474 of the watercolors in the Society’s collection, among them all of the surviving studies made for the plates in The Birds of America, Roberta J.M. Olson introduces us to a painter whose sophistication and skill are barely hinted at in the engravings prepared on their basis.

Following a brief biographical sketch of the man she calls “an American icon,” Olson proceeds to a well-written and informative 70-page essay situating Audubon in the historical tradition of ornithological and natural history illustration. Especially eye-opening are Audubon’s early works, many reproduced and discussed for the first time here. His European goldfinch of 1803 (unfortunately included in the exhibition only in facsimile) is the only known painting to survive from the time before the still young artist left France for Pennsylvania, and the pieces prepared in 1805-1806 (some during a stay in Nantes, others on his return to America) show Audubon imitating, and rapidly excelling, such eighteenth-century models as Martinet and Daubenton.

Olson cannily points to Jean-Baptiste Oudry, court painter to Louis XV and illustrator of Audubon’s beloved La Fontaine, as the inspiration for the more violent paintings—but oddly fails to point out what is by far the most eloquent example of Oudrian influence, Audubon's tour de force rendering of a covey of Northern Bobwhites panicked by a Red-shouldered Hawk.  

Olson is occasionally swept off her scholarly feet by her subject, and she sometimes understates the contributions of some of Audubons’ contemporaries and colleagues, most notably William MacGillivray. The great Scot is here rightly acknowledged as the “unsung hero” of Audubon’s (and MacGillivray’s!) Ornithological Biography, but his considerable and substantive contributions to that work are characterized only as “help” with “scientific information and grammar.”

As to the enormously complicated relationship between Audubon and Wilson (and Wilson’s posthumous champions), Olson seems willing to reduce it to a competition “in which Audubon takes the prize.” Interestingly, though the author identifies several instances of Audubon's reliance on Rees’s Cyclopaedia, she does not mention that the assistant editor of the American edition of that standard reference was for a time Alexander Wilson.

An informative essay by Marjorie Shelley describing Audubon’s tools and techniques as a watercolorist introduces 114 of the original paintings. Full-page (or larger) reproductions of the highest quality, these images—presented in the order in which the plates engraved from them were issued—reveal some of the subtlety of the originals’ “illusionistic textures” and deep three-dimensionality. Well known as these pictures are in their engraved form, close study of the watercolors can still produce ornithological discoveries: Audubon’s junco, for example, so obviously a Slate-colored Junco in the published colored engraving, is equally clearly a Cassiar Junco avant la lettre in the original painting.  Penciled instructions cast light on the relationship between Audubon, his assistants, and his publishers, while the constantly updated taxonomic notes show Audubon eager to be on the cutting edge of classification and naming.

Each of the 114 paintings is annotated on the facing page with the species’ modern name, a cross-reference to the engraved plate in The Birds of America, and a description of the media Aubudon employed. Roberta Olson’s text, which in a few unfortunate cases runs unattractively close to the bottom of the page, typically includes extensive quotations from the Ornithological Biography (sadly without precise citations), notes on similar or related works in the oeuvre of Audubon or his contemporaries, and miscellaneous ornithological commentary, in some cases touching on the bird’s current conservation status. The level of accuracy and insight here is almost unfailingly high, with only rare lapses: the early drawing of the Rose-breasted Grosbeak depicted on page 226 really cannot be considered “the model” for any of the birds in the later painting, for example, and it is happily not true that “ornithologists of today” have no choice but to “cull” Connecticut Warblers for study.

These featured images are followed by thumbnails, nine to the page, of all the remaining paintings in the collections of the New-York Historical Society, rather unhelpfully presented by accession number. The dramatic painting of a Laughing Gull, here figure 498, is misidentified as a Common Black-headed Gull (it was also mislabeled in the exhibition). A complete census of the Audubon paintings precedes a very useful chronology, a clearly laid-out selective bibliography, and an excellent index.

Both of these handsome volumes are highly recommended to historians, historians of art, and anyone interested in where North American ornithology and birding culture came from. Audubon’s Aviary is certain to remain the best paper resource on the artist’s work for decades to come, replaceable only by a publication in a technology yet undreamed of. Wilson, too, gathers priceless visual material nowhere else available between two covers.

Thanks to the quirks of calendars and mortality, we will be celebrating Alexander Wilson again just three years from now, on the 250th anniversary of his birth. With the rich new material provided by these recent publications at hand, perhaps that will be occasion for a biblio-biography of the Father of American Ornithology and his work—and a critical study of his reception by Audubon and all his ornithological sons and daughters.

Recommended citation:

Wright, R. 2013. Fathers and Sons [a review of Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology, by Edward H. Burtt, Jr., and William E. Davis, Jr.; and of Audubon's Aviary: The Original Watercolors for the Birds of America, by Roberta J.M Olson]. Birding 45(4):68.

Rare Birds

A review by Eric Salzman

Atlas of Rare Birds, by Dominic Couzens

MIT Press, 2010

240 pages, $29.95—hardcover 

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13366

The World’s Rarest Birds, by Erik Hirschfeld, Andy Swash, and Robert Still

Princeton University Press, 2013

360 pages, $45.00—hardcover 

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13699

Common, everyday field guides try to portray the most common, everyday birds (along with the occasional local rarity); that makes sense for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it helps sell a lot of books.

A volume of rare birds, on the other hand, is bound, almost by definition, to be itself a rarity, a special publication for connoisseurs of rare things, like expensive fine wines or limited-edition publications. I remember a 1990 volume out of New Zealand (of all places) in which 100 depictions of 50 rarae aves by one Blake Twigden were bound up in a leather-bound edition of such luxuriousness (and cost) as to dwarf the pictures and the subject matter. Many, perhaps most of the birds were painted from specimens; certainly, few readers in those days ever expected to see very many of them alive and in the wild.

Times have changed. Twenty years later, Dominic Couzens selected his own 50 rarities, many (if not most) of which he has undoubtedly seen himself. The title Atlas of Rare Birds is misleading; the book is organized not geographically, but conceptually, with five birds assigned to each of ten categories: Back From the Brink, Island Living, Oddball Threats, Problems of Migrants, Unexpected Calamities, Lost Causes, Controversies, Recent Discoveries, Rediscoveries, and The Unknowns. That takes him from the California Condor to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker while circling the globe in between. Couzens has enough room to spread out that he can devote two to four pages to the story of each of these sought-after creatures. Still, there are only 50 and, while each one is worthy, there are more rarities gone missing than accounted for.

The World’s Rarest Birds is actually the volume that deserves the title of Atlas. This new and comprehensive work is organized on strictly geographic principles. Relying on the IUCN Red List, it covers all 590 species rated in that list as Endangered or Critically Endangered, all laid out in a series of Regional Directories: Europe and the Middle East, Asia, Australasia, Oceanic Islands, the Caribbean, North and Central America, and South America.

Each of these geographic sections is introduced by essays on threatened hotspots and regional conservation challenges. Every species gets a medium-size illustration (515 of them with good color photographs, the others with paintings), and each is given its own range map and a tight, informative paragraph based on data from Birdlife International.

The book's front matter presents a very useful compendium of the major threats facing birds worldwide. Additional sections are devoted to extinct species, to globally threatened bird families, and to species where data are inadequate.

No one person has seen all the birds included here, but there are birders out there who have logged a very high number of them (even I have seen a few dozen). If you do any sort of world birding, or even just dream about it, this is nothing short of scripture.

- Eric Salzman is a composer, writer, and birder, and the former review editor at Birding. Labor Records/Naxos is re-issuing "The Nude Paper Sermon" and the four works that constitute the "Wiretap" album, and his opera "Big Jim & the Small-time Investors" is scheduled for production in 2014. Salzman birds from the south shore of Long Island.

Recommended citation:

Salzman, E. 2013. Rare Birds [a review of The World's Rarest Birds, by Erik Hirshfeld, Andy Swash, and Robert Still, and of Atlas of Rare Birds, by Dominic Couzens]. Birding 45(4):66.

Transforming American Ornithology

A review by Frederick Davis

The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds, by Daniel Lewis

Yale University Press, 2012

346 pages, $45.00—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13676

Quick: Who is the most significant figure in the history of American ornithology between Audubon and Mayr?

Hint: Who else achieved such status as to be instantly recognized by just a single name?

Time’s up.

Thankfully, there is no definitive answer to this rhetorical—and deeply flawed—question, but Daniel Lewis makes a remarkably convincing case for the Smithsonian ornithologist Robert Ridgway.

To call Lewis's Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds a biography would miss the point. Though Lewis does reveal a great deal about Ridgway’s life, from his birth in 1850 to his death almost 80 years later, this important study is, as its subtitle suggests, a prosopography, an investigation of a culture and a community, that "feathery tribe" of American ornithologists including Joel Asaph Allen, Elliott Coues, and William Brewster, who, collectively, refined the study of birds as a key component of the modern life sciences while simultaneously establishing the place of birds in nature study.

A childhood in rural Illinois provided Ridgway with a talent for shooting and the ability to apply himself to unpleasant tasks. The first of ten children, the young man cheerfully bore the brunt of family chores. At the precocious age of thirteen, he sent a letter about the birds he had seen to the U.S. Patent Office, which in those days maintained a bird collection; that letter eventually found its way to Spencer Fullerton Baird, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Baird replied, urging the nascent naturalist to learn scientific names. Thus began a productive correspondence, one that led Ridgway to his first job and ultimately determined the course of his entire career. 

With Baird’s recommendation, the seventeen-year-old Ridgway joined the Fortieth Parallel Survey as a zoologist. The job was a dream come true, and in the two years he accompanied the expedition, Ridgway confronted with remarkable aplomb lightning strikes, mosquito swarms, fevers, diarrhea, delirium, hostile Indians, thefts, and desertions.

Ridgway returned to the Smithsonian with nearly 1,500 specimens. Moreover, he had developed valuable skills as a “birdman,” skills he put to good use at the museum. In his first few years, the still young ornithologist wrote an extensive account of the discoveries made by the Fortieth Parallel Survey, and he began the long work of unraveling the relationships among the birds of North America. Ridgway was just one of the numerous young “Bairdians,” but when the great Nestor of American ornithologists died in 1887, it was Ridgway who would deliver the memorial address.

Drawing on his expanding network of amateur and professional collectors, Ridgway strove to expand the Smithsonian's bird holdings, eventually donating his own collection at a time when others were selling theirs. That generous act is all the more surprising given how the Ridgway family struggled on his meager Smithsonian salary. Preparing illustrations served as a source of additional income, though payment for those contributions varied wildly. Ridgway also worked as a colorist, relying on his extensive knowledge of avian structure and plumage. Unfortunately, The Feathery Tribe reproduces only one of Ridgway’s many bird portraits.

Museum duties and professional interactions more than filled Ridgway's days, and they play a central role in The Feathery Tribe, but Lewis also portrays other, more personal aspects of Ridgway’s life, including his magnanimous accommodation of requests and visits from the public, disruptions that less generous men might not have tolerated.  

The founding of the Nuttall Ornithological Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, coincided with the birth of other professional societies in the late nineteenth century. Lewis's account of the early days of the club—the first professional organization devoted entirely to ornithology—reveals much about its founders and board, most of whom were, naturally, members of "the feathery tribe."

The original leaders, especially Allen and Coues, envisioned the Nuttall Club as a springboard to scientific and professional careers rather than as a haven for “bird lovers” or other amateurs. Ridgway, neither a board member nor a New England resident, labored away in the Smithsonian collections writing for the club's Bulletin; indeed, the first issue, published in April 1876, featured Ridgway's frontispiece illustration of the newly discovered Brewster's Warbler, along with a formal description provided by William Brewster himself. 

From their base in the Nuttall Club, Coues and Allen took the lead in establishing the American Ornithologists' Union. In 1882, Ridgway and Coues served as the AOU's inaugural vice presidents, with Allen as president.

Through Ridgway’s papers and correspondence, Lewis offers tantalizing hints about the lives and work of contemporary collectors, who worked on the “front line of discovery” but receive limited attention today in historical accounts. In their reports to Ridgway, collectors described both the wonders of underexplored regions and the challenges of shooting and skinning up to fifty birds a day, efforts that, as Lewis points out, produced the valuable series of specimens that ornithologists needed to study variation between individuals and across regions. Such studies, by Ridgway, Allen, and Coues in particular, drove the development of the modern subspecies concept in ornithology.

While the ornithologists exulted in the realization of their collective ambitions, they also shared some surprising concerns. To an individual, the feathery tribe seems to have suffered symptoms of what might today be called depression; Lewis offers the intriguing suggestion that those complaints, which increased in late spring and summer, when the largest numbers of specimens were prepared, indicate chronic poisoning by the arsenic used in putting up skins. A telling photo of Ridgway clearly shows the blackened fingernails associated with arsenic poisoning.

Ridgway published widely over his long career, in both scientific and popular periodicals, and illustrated many other publications, often without credit. In describing new species, he commemorated friends and collectors in scientific names, a favor often returned.

Ridgway synthesized his artistic skill and his scientific eye in his Color Standards and Color Nomenclature of 1912. Lewis argues that in devising color standards, Ridgway stepped beyond his own professional authority—but his system and some of his names have outlived him and are still used today. 

The Birds of North and Middle America, published as Bulletin of the United States National Museum No. 50, was Ridgway’s magnum opus. A monumental project to write a technical description for every species and subspecies in the region, including the West Indies and the Galápagos, this work absorbed much of Ridgway’s professional effort from 1894 to his death in 1929. Lewis argues that North and Middle America reveals that Ridgway had lost touch with trends in the biological sciences: the work is far more “Linnaean than Darwinian.” At the same time, the arcane descriptions alienated amateur naturalists, who found them far removed from the living birds they sought. Yet Lewis suggests that the precision of Ridgway’s language, though increasingly obscure to amateurs, made possible the evolution of scientific thought.

Readers of Birding will appreciate Lewis’s analysis of early efforts to produce definitive checklists to North American birds while at the same time trying to stay current with constant nomenclatural change. Plus ça change.... Ridgway produced several checklists himself, but it was the pugnacious Coues who positioned himself at the center of such debates with his own Check Lists and the five editions of his Key to North American Birds. 

The Feathery Tribe captures well how Robert Ridgway and a coterie of ornithologists established ornithology as a scientific study, open to amateurs and professionals alike, while striving to eke out a living and define their own professional identities. By placing Ridgway’s life and work at the Smithsonian at the center of his book, Daniel Lewis reveals how a few dedicated ornithologists refined and transformed the study of birds in America.

- Frederick R. Davis is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University, where he teaches the history of science and medicine and environmental history. His The Man Who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. Davis is an avid and lifelong birder.

Recommended citation:

Davis, F. 2013. Transforming American Ornithology [a review of The Feathery Tribe, by Daniel Lewis]. Birding 45(4):65.

 

Pennsylvania: The Second Snapshot

A review by Troy Corman

Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Pennsylvania, edited by Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, and Robert S. Mulvihill

Penn State University Press, 2012

586 pages, $64.95—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13906

I was raised in rural south-central Pennsylvania, but moved away before fieldwork began in 1983 for the state’s first breeding bird atlas. Fortunately, though, projects like this are designed to be repeated, and when data collection for the second atlas started, twenty years later, I was able to spend a week or so of several consecutive Junes in the same forests and along the same streams and trails where my passion for the outdoors and birding had first taken flight, a passion that has guided my career path ever since.

Pennsylvania may not be a major U.S. birding destination, but its varied landscapes attract a remarkable selection of both resident and migratory breeding birds—at least 208 native and established exotic species are confirmed to have bred there, among them an amazing 30 species of warblers. That rich species diversity and the commonwealth’s long and impressive history of ornithological investigation is the subject of several books, including the first Atlas of Breeding Birds in Pennsylvania, published in 1992.

As dedicated atlasers already know, the production of a breeding bird atlas requires monumental effort on the part of hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled volunteer birders and professional ornithologists. And it all has to be repeated. As the North American Ornithological Atlas Committee notes, “The tremendous value of breeding bird atlases will only begin to be realized when each state or province completes their second atlas. At that time, two ‘snapshots’ in time of breeding bird distributions will be available for comparison and conclusions can be reached about the changes in distributions that have occurred.” Repeated atlasing, of course, also provides data on population trends, which can prompt research and conservation efforts for declining species and the habitats on which they depend.

Data for Pennsylvania’s second atlas were collected from 2004 to 2009, and the new book that resulted from that work provides us with an up-to-date overview of the current distribution and status of each breeding species, plus a tremendous amount of insightful analysis.

Early chapters in the Second Atlas discuss the goals and purpose of the project. The project framework and survey methods remained largely the same from the first to the second atlas, though there were efforts made to capture certain aspects missing from the first: For example, field crews were hired this time around to take point counts measuring the geographic variability of species abundance. One of my favorite sections in the new Atlas is the enlightening chapters describing the state’s geography, habitat, and land use. The many color maps and vivid descriptions provide a thorough introduction to the physical aspects of Pennsylvania’s environment that influence the distribution and abundance of the avian life that breeds there. 

Another brief chapter, “Interpreting Species Accounts,” greatly increases the reader’s appreciation of the many fine details to be gleaned from each of the 190 two-page accounts, prepared by no fewer than 52 authors. Those authors and the book’s editors—Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, and Robert S. Mulvihill—have taken full advantage of technologies and analytical methods that have emerged since publication of the first Atlas, making this second a sharply attractive, revealing, and masterfully prepared book.

Each species account includes a very good to excellent color photo, often, aptly, depicting adults at the nest or engaged in other breeding behavior. As expected, comparison of the data collected for each of the atlases is a significant part of these accounts; distribution changes (or their absence) are noted, and the Pennsylvania information is often compared with that discovered by second atlasing efforts in some adjacent states and provinces, thus placing apparent trends into a regional context.

Understandably, there is an obvious effort to avoid duplicating information already captured in the first Atlas. However, I find it mildly disappointing that so much natural history information has been omitted from the new species accounts. Appendix F in the Second Atlas provides a tabular summary of phenological data for most species; I would have liked to see some explicit discussion of the differences in breeding phenology discovered between the two atlases. Data continues to accumulate suggesting that the average timing of some species’ migration and nesting has already begun to shift, shifts possibly related to climate change.     

The second page of each account features two or three easily interpreted statewide maps. The first and largest depicts where the species was detected during the second atlas. Any changes in distribution between the two atlases are clearly noted on the second map. In the case of more common and widespread species, a third map depicts the geographic density of singing males as determined by point counts.

Each account also includes a table showing the number of blocks in which the species was identified by each atlasing project as a possible, a probable, or a confirmed breeder; changes between the two atlases are expressed as a percentage. Worrisome numbers include those for the Red-headed Woodpecker, which declined by 46 percent, and for the Golden-winged Warbler, down 61 percent between the two atlases. Compare that with the incredible increases in breeding Common Ravens—114 percent—and Bald Eagles—949 percent! These changes are discussed in detail in each account, with insightful suggestions as to why specific species have declined or increased, or why their distribution in the state has shifted.        

Appendix A includes brief accounts for a dozen former nesting species and a table listing ten additional birds that have not been documented nesting in Pennsylvania since the 1970s or before, including the Heath Hen and the Passenger Pigeon. Oddly missing from this list is the Glossy Ibis, noted in the first Atlas as a confirmed breeder on the Susquehanna River in the 1970s.

Few other resources provide so complete a picture of bird distribution over time as a breeding bird atlas, and few are so helpful in the long-term monitoring of avian populations. It is hard to imagine that any birder would not want a copy of the Second Atlas, whether in Pennsylvania or anywhere in the region, a region that stretches as far north as Quebec and as far west as Ontario (both jurisdictions, by the way, with magnificent atlas projects of their own). An exceptional summary of a large amount of data, presented in a sharp and impressive tome, this work sets a new standard for atlases to come.

It may take up a lot of space on your bookshelf, but as an informative and inspiring reference, the Second Atlas of Breeding in Birds in Pennsylvania is a worthy tenant. I am honored to be one of the many who participated in this endeavor. As much as I learned while helping collect data, I continued to be enlightened as I reviewed this fine resource.

Troy Corman is a biologist in the Arizona Game and Fish Department, where he coordinates long-term statewide bird monitoring projects. He coordinated the Arizona breeding bird atlas project and served as co-editor of the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas (2005). Corman is president and a founding member of the Arizona Field Ornithologists. His interests include the distribution and seasonal status of birds, conservation, and travel.

Recommended citation:

Corman, T. 2013. Pennsylvania: The Second Snapshot [a review of Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Pennsylvania, edited by Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, and Robert S. Mulvhill]. Birding 45(3):67.

Crossley does Raptors

If you follow many bird blogs you may have noticed a lot of press recently for the upcoming Crossley ID
guide to Raptors (scheduled for release in April- your order from Buteo Books helps support the ABA!)  Crossley Books and Princeton University Press have coordinated a bird blog tour to introduce the book and I'm very pleased to be a part of it.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few years you are no doubt familiar with the revolutionary approach to field guides taken by Richard Crossley.  His idea of using digital photographic montages, representing the many aspects of birds we see in the field in a single plate filled with imagery of subjects near and far, perched and in flight, from above and from below, etc. was a refreshingly unique idea first seen in his ID Guide to Eastern Birds.  Here Richard has collaborated with raptor gurus Jerry Liguouri and Brian Sullivan to take the concept a bit further.  Yes, the trademark composited assemblages are still at the heart of the book but much more text has been added in the back in the form of detailed species accounts and fine-resolution distribution maps.  The book also includes several "quiz" plates, featuring multiple looks at raptors in different circumstances often encountered by enthusiasts and photographers in the field.  These include themes such as Prairie Raptors, Buteos of the Midwest Prairie, Soaring Widespread Common Raptors, Hovering Raptors, Raptor Topsides, Southeastern Raptors, Raptors of the South, Raptors Going Away, Raptors in Black & White (to emphasize structure and simulate bad lighting conditions), Sunrise on the East Coast (raptors washed in warm light), and Into the Sun (backlit raptors.)  These plates have numbered birds without ID labels, with discussion points and the answers given in the back.  In short, the book represents a master course on raptor ID and should be in the arsenal of any serious birder in the US, especially those with a fondness for birds of prey.  Copies at hawk watches are bound to be dog-eared and broken-spined through loving use by the end of the season, as it offers fantastic comparison photos of any given species of any age or color morph from about any angle and in many types of lighting (just like one encounters in the field!)  

So my role in this blog tour is to connect bird photography and the book.  What I'll say here is that the guide (along with Crossley's ID Guide to Eastern Birds and upcoming UK and Western editions) show that bird pics can be useful even if they are distant, taken in tough light, etc.  I know there is debate about teaching new birders traditional field skills and critical observation techniques vs. just snapping away at everything and figuring out what's on the card later.  I appreciate the tension between these extremes but I honestly think that the two approaches aren't mutually exclusive.  I know that I have personally learned a lot by anaylizing the myriad of bird photos I've taken just as the countless thousands of hours of keenly listening to birds and staring through my bins and scope have improved my ID skills.  When the opportunity presents itself my advice is take pics and look critically at birds, then compare notes when you get home of what you thought you saw vs. what you find in your pics. When it comes to raptors, there is often time to both hoist bins and snap a few pics of a circling bird.  Even if it is just a private guess to yourself, stick a name on the bird in the field and then at home see what the pics indicate and note anything you may have missed on the live bird.  

Anyway, as a wrap-up event for the blog tour, Richard Crossley and Brian Sullivan will host a live online Raptor ID Happy Hour from 6 to 7pm EDT.  Click on over to this Shindig link to RSVP!  There's also a generous sweepstakes with some sweet prizes on offer- link here to enter (& make sure to do so by Friday when the contest ends...)

An example of a species account in the new Crossley ID Guide to Raptors (in this case Zone-tailed Hawk.)

 

Plates like this show many ages and angles of a given species (care to take a stab at identifying this one?)

 

Other plates show collections of many species to practice ID skills on, like this example of backlit birds of prey.

North America's Oldest New Bird?

A review of Snyder and Fry, Validity of Bartram's Painted Vulture (Aves: Cathartidae). Zootaxa 3613(1):61-82. 

I bet it's been a while since you've seen a Small-headed Flycatcher, or a Townsend's Bunting, or a Carbonated Warbler. But I'm equally sure that most of us have heard of those birds, "nonce species" collected or claimed once or twice a couple of hundred years ago and never reliably encountered since.

And I'm almost as confident that there are birders who have never run across the Painted Vulture.

In 1774, William Bartram, the great Pennsylvania botanist and naturalist, was in Florida. There he found two vulture species "not mentioned in history," one of them "a beautiful bird,"

the painted vulture. The bill is long and strait almost to the point, when it is hooked or bent suddenly down and sharp; the head and neck bare of feathers nearly down to the stomach, when the feathers begin to cover the skin, and soon become long and of a soft texture, forming a ruff or tippet, in which the bird by contracting his neck can hide that as well as his head; the bare skin on the neck appears loose and wrinkled, which is of a deep bright yellow colour, intermixed with coral red; the hinder part of the neck is nearly covered with short, stiff hair; and the skin of this part of the neck is of a dun-purple colour, gradually becoming red as it approaches the yellow of the sides and forepart. The crown of the head is red; there are lobed lappets of a redish orange colour, which lay on the base of the upper mandible.... The plumage of the bird is generally white or cream colour, except the quill-feathers of the wings and two or three rows of the coverts, which are of a beautiful dark brown; the tail which is large and white is tipped with this dark brown or black; the legs and feet of a clear white; the eye is encircled with a gold coloured iris; the pupil black. (Bartram, Travels 150-151)

American ornithology has been skeptical: While a few authors (including, if memory serves, Roger Tory Peterson in the 1980 Field Guide) have been willing to believe that Bartram had seen and then incompetently described a King Vulture, most simply assume that his Florida bird is concocted of poor memory, rich imagination, and ignorance.

Now come Noel Snyder and Joel Fry with a compelling re-assessment of the evidence—some of it familiar, much of it new—for the historic validity of Bartram's Painted Vulture. Their argument is as simple as it is cogent: There is at least one earlier eighteenth-century description and painting, evidently unknown to Bartram, of birds resembling his (and differing in similar ways from the King Vulture); and none of the modern arguments against the credibility of Bartram's description bears up under closer examination. They conclude:

Together, these and other factors make a strong case for acceptance of Bartram's Painted Vulture as a historic resident of northern Florida and likely adjacent regions.... extinct by the early 19th century.

Forty years before Bartram's Florida discovery, Eleazar Albin described and painted a living vulture kept in captivity in London; the authors note that both Albin's text and his illustration (above) are a "close match" for the Painted Vulture. Particularly notable is the tail pattern, described (and, in the case of Albin, painted) as white with a black tip: the tail of the King Vulture, in contrast, is black, a difference mentioned expressly by none other than John Cassin in what Snyder and Fry call his "endorsement" of Bartram's vulture as "a species [otherwise] entirely unknown."  

Albin's painting and description are the strongest eighteenth-century evidence for the existence of the Painted Vulture, but the authors are also able to adduce other support, painstakingly gathered from a range of sources and evaluated with admirable care. A 1758 Histoire de la Louisiane describes a "white eagle" closely reminiscent of Bartram's vulture. Bartram himself depicted a fan possibly made of such vulture feathers in a portrait he drew of the Creek warrior-king Mico Chlucco. More tenuous, but still suggestive, is the evidence provided by the bird-shaped handle of a prehistoric bowl from Alabama, showing "a clearly vulturine or raptorial beak shape together with a projection on the forehead that could be a representation of the fleshy lappets of a King or Painted Vulture." Both the fan and the bowl, along with Albin's painting, are reproduced in the present paper's figures. 

In the second part of their paper, Snyder and Fry convincingly refute the arguments against Bartram's reliability in describing his new vulture. They defend the Quaker explorer against the charge that he was writing from memory (his field notes are no longer extant, but they are referred to in his other writings), and point out that the sixty years between Bartram's visit to Florida and the next ornithological expedition to explore the area was, sadly, plenty of time for an already scarce species to approach extinction.

A number of ornithologists, starting with the influential Joel Asaph Allen, have suggested that Bartram's vulture was in fact a misidentified Northern Caracara. The authors rightly dismiss this far-fetched possibility:

That any beginning bird student might construct a description resembling Bartram's painted Vulture based on viewing a Caracara seems extremely doubtful. That Bartram might have done so seems beyond all credibility....    

There is no reason, the authors conclude, not to accord Bartram's description the same serious consideration granted other naturalists from the same period, and every reason to believe that that description refers to a hitherto unrecognized vulture from the southeastern United States, whether a pale-tailed form of the more widespread King Vulture or, in Snyder and Fry's view more likely, a distinct species Sarcoramphus sacer (and not McAtee's sacra, as the genus name is grammatically masculine). 

What happens next? The AOU Committee on Classification and Nomenclature acts on proposals submitted to the committee's Chair, publishing its determinations each July. None of us will ever witness a scene like that in Narca Moore-Craig's stunning painting of hunting Painted Vultures, but if two thirds of the AOU Committee is convinced by Snyder and Fry's arguments—and I believe they should be—we will see in our lifetime the true "de-extinction" of a wrongly dismissed species.    

Who You Callin' Amateur?

A review by Rick Wright

 

Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, by Jack Hitt

Crown, 2012

280 pages, $26—Hardcover

In January 1917, Harold Gifford called in the pages of The Condor for the founding of a League for the Extermination of Amateur Ornithologists. The editors responded: Dr. Gifford

does not seem to realize that with the extermination of the amateur ornithologist, scientific ornithology is doomed to die out inside of one generation!

The notion that we birdwatchers contribute to science is a venerable one, running, in Mary Clench's felicitous phrase, "from the Pilgrims to the present." Historically, at least, there's a fair bit of truth to it: You may know the story of Eliot Howard, the manager of a steel plant in Britain and a fan of the Common Reed Bunting who, in 1920, introduced the concept of territoriality to English-speaking academic ornithology. And here in America, the great ornithological societies might never have survived their incunabula if not for dues-paying members drawn from the ranks of us dilettantes.

Jack Hitt's Bunch of Amateurs is an anecdotal exploration of the role of the amateur in American intellectual life, drawing for its vast range of examples on archeology, diplomacy, microbiology, robotics, anthropology, astronomy—and yes, ornithology. The test case in that last field, the one that matters to us, is the most celebrated of the century so far, the claimed rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker almost a decade ago. Hitt—a contributing editor at The NYT Magazine, Harpers, and Lingua Franca—had just been let in on the secret by a slightly indiscreet friend inside The Nature Conservancy when, on that April day in 2005, the story 

leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers.... The eminent director of the Cornell Labratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said "This is dead solid confirmed."

That untimely revelation denied Hitt his journalistic scoop. He overcame his disappointment, though, and quickly saw what too few have noticed even now: that "the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird." The story was about much more than the factual matter of whether the big woodpecker survived or not; it became mythological,

a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.

That's an admirably neat summary cast in enviably catchy language. But as we read on in the narrative of the Campephilus affair, it becomes clearer and clearer that the aperçu is too pithy by half. The mismatch between the tidiness of Hitt's categories and the messy individual realities of his subjects is a recurring problem in the book, but nowhere as obvious as it is here. What Hitt's simple heuristic paints as a battle pitting credentialed experts against ragtag hobbyists was far more complex, a series of sometimes discrete, sometimes overlapping struggles, with academics and amateurs, birders and bloggers, gurus and kooks coming down on both sides (all sides?) of the debate. 

Any distinction between "professionals" and "amateurs," in other words, makes it impossible to tell this story right.

Hitt also, here and occasionally in the book's other chapters, falls prey to a temptation he himself warns against at the beginning of his book: the identification of the amateur with the freak. Cornell's search team brought many well-known and eminently serious birders—amateurs—to the Big Woods, but they don't get much space on the page here. Instead, Hitt regales us with tales of a "perky" volunteer and a "ghost-chaser." Both anecdotes are uproariously funny (the one speaks mysteriously of her Ivorybill experience as if it were a state secret, the other "sees the bird quite a lot when she's alone"), but both are a little mean-spirited, as if Hitt were on a search not for the American character but for characters.

Hitt is absolutely right on, though, when he relaxes his focus on "amateurism" to consider the Ivorybill story from the point of view of narrative convention.

Every time, these expeditions seemed to be remakes of the exact same buddy flick. The courtly individual from the Yankee Ivy League college gets taken into the woods by the joshing redneck who knows the ground.... This repetitive quality to the stories—the experts, the fuzzy image, the pleas for belief and the collapse of the evidence, the Yankee intellectual and the Southern woodsman, the ultimate quest for land protection—meant that the search for the ivory-bill...was American mythology.

That is a powerful observation, one less about the status of a more or less extinct woodpecker than about the way in which the human mind creates truth. Hopes, dreams, and observations—for birders, for ornithologists, for amateurs and for professionals—make sense to us only when they fit into a comforting framework, only when they can be made to retell a story we've heard and told before. Maybe, as Hitt almost suggests, the problem with this latest (certainly not the last) Ivorybill affair was that the professionals started to tell an amateur story.

The categories don't work in this story—but they haven't worked in the North American bird world for decades now. In Harold Gifford's long-ago day, professional ornithologists and amateur ornithologists were engaged in much the same activities: shooting, skinning, and classifying. Nearly a century later, ornithology has become so specialized, so technical a discipline that it is nonsensical to speak, as Hitt does, of "amateurs" in that field. There are professional ornithologists, there are amateur birders, there are (even) professional birders; but, I would point out, there are no amateur ornithologists, unaffiliated, uncredentialed, uncertified dilettantes who while away the winter weekends in the garage, tinkering with their homemade electrophoresis kits.

But that doesn't mean that the editors of The Condor were entirely wrong, or that our long-lived pious belief in the contributions of the birder to science is always false. Properly trained bird banders with well-designed and well-defined projects, census-takers for the Breeding Bird Surveys, even careful Christmas counters and conscientious eBirders are all among the amateurs piling up the data for generations of professionals to come. It's not as sexy a story, but those and other enterprises like them just might tell us more about the American character than even the tale of the Ivorybill.     

 

Recommended citation:

Wright, R. 2013. Who You Callin' Amateur? [a review of Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, by Jack Hitt]. Birding 45(2):67.

Let's Go Boiding

A review by Eric Salzman

Extinct Birds Boids 

by Ralph Steadman 

Bloomsbury, 2012 

240 pages, $50–hardcover

Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds 

by John Long and Peter Schouten

Oxford UP, 2008

208 pages, $39.95–hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 12867

 

In early 2011, a documentary filmmaker by the name of Ceri Levy had the odd idea to ask Ralph Steadman—an artist better known for his social and political black-humor caricatures (think Hunter Thompson) than for his love of nature—to contribute to a multi-artist exhibition entitled Ghosts of Gone Birds. Steadman’s first effort, the Japanese Egret (sic), appears to have come straight out of a video game. But shortly thereafter, a stupendous “Great Extinct Auk” appeared, followed by a Giant Moa and a Choiseul Crested Pigeon—real gone birds indeed. And then, astonishingly enough, especially considering Steadman’s previous line of work, the “boids”—as he prefers to call them—continued to appear in a steady stream for the better part of a year. In the end, there were 100 sheets, enough to fill not only a whole room at the exhibition but an entire coffee-table art book from Bloomsbury.

A few of Steadman’s boids are not yet actually extinct, but most of them, including a shocking number from Hawaii, are indeed not around any longer to appreciate or to protest their high-handed treatment from the wicked pen of one of the great cartoonists of our time. The boids emerge from some unlikely ink splatters and then, like the canny politicians and wise guys Steadman loves to caricature, take on all sorts of petulant poses and angry airs, apparently defying their fate with panache.

As the series goes on and the scratches and blotches get bolder and more colorful, the Steadman boids became more and more fanciful, eventually including such specimens as the Quink, the Lousy Grudgian, the Mottled Splatwink, and the Lesser Peruvian Blue-beaked Blotswerve. No way any of these are going to go extinct, and, absurd as they might seem, I am not sure that they are any more remarkable than his interpretations of boids that used to be actual birds. I never thought I’d see the day when a book on extinction—birds, boids, what have you—would make me laugh out loud!

Steadman’s aviary includes the Orange-beaked One-Wing Jurassic and the White-winged Feathered Dinosaur, protoboids that are, being dinos, extinct by definition. I couldn’t find either of them in Feathered Dinosaurs, but the creatures painted there by Peter Schouten, although in a radically different and neo-realistic style, are hardly any less bizarre and colorful.

I have no idea how accurate or how fanciful these reconstructions are, but I suppose that Schouten’s realizations of that branch of the dinosaurian line that led to modern, er, boids are not that much more speculative than most dinosaur depictions. Most of these feathered dinos are relatively recent discoveries from China--some of them described from a mere few fragments of fossilized bone. That doesn’t seem to have discouraged Schouten and his collaborator, John Long, who give their reasons for imagining how these beasts might actually have looked and behaved.

Steadman’s boids are realized with splatters of ink, patches of color, and Steadman’s wicked wit. Schouten is, by contrast, meticulous. He took a couple of years to create pictures of active, colorful, predatory, displaying protobirds mucking about in the Late Jurassic or Cretaceous. The sequence of the illustrations suggests that, as time went on, the members of this dinosaur line became more and more bird-like, culminating not just in Archaeopteryx but also in Confuciusornis sanctus, the Sacred Confucius Bird.

By the end of the book, these creatures look like outtakes from a Helm or Princeton guide to some lost subcontinent. This volume has been out for a while, but it’s still available. You won’t laugh out loud, but it should evoke a gasp or two, and if you ever run into any of these guys, you might actually be able to use it as a field guide. Protoboiding, perhaps.

- Eric Salzman is a composer, writer, and birder, and the former review editor at Birding. Recordings of his work are on Labor Records/Naxos. His opera "Big Jim & the Small-time Investors" had a workshop in 2012 and is scheduled for production in 2014. He specializes in both birding and boiding from East Quogue, on the south shore of Eastern Long Island.

Recommended citation:

Salzman, E. 2013. Let's Go Boiding [a review of Extinct Boids, by Ralph Steadman, and of Feathered Dinosaurs, by John Long and Peter Schouten]. Birding 45(2):66.

A New Standard for the 'Stans

A review by Steve Rooke

Birds of Central Asia

by Raffael Ayé, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth

Princeton University Press, 2012

336 pages, $39.50—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13583

 

Almost a quarter of a century after the breakup of the Soviet Union, tourists are flocking to the manmade and natural wonders of the Silk Road. Birders were especially quick to recognize Central Asia’s potential, and Kazakhstan has become a very popular destination in recent years. Up until now, though, we have been hampered by the lack of a good, up-to-date field guide. While V. E. Flint’s 1984 Birds of the USSR was thorough in its coverage, that book had its limitations, and so we made do with bits and pieces of other guides covering the periphery of the Central Asian region. The new Birds of Central Asia has been long anticipated, and its arrival in the Helm/Princeton series is much welcomed.

Covering the six “stans”—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan—Birds of Central Asia features 618 species in a relatively slim volume. Constructed on what is now the almost standard field guide format, the book includes the usual introductory chapters, including a brief but useful introduction to the region’s geography and biogeography, illustrated with photos that, if nothing more, serve to demonstrate how incredibly varied and stunningly scenic Central Asia is. A short section on taxonomy and nomenclature details the authors’ departures from their primary authority in such matters, the third, 2003 edition of The Howard and Moore Complete Checklist. 

In the body of the book, the text for each species faces the relevant plate, which is as it should be. Almost every species has a small distribution map giving the reader a reasonably good idea of the bird’s range.

The appendices include a list of old, undocumented, or doubtful records; I am not sure why the Oriental Plover, well photographed in the north of Kazakhstan in 1990, is not included here or described in the main text. There is also a brief discussion of gull identification and of the molts and aging of large raptors.

Overall, Birds of Central Asia is a well-produced, compact guide that lives up to the standard set by Helm and Princeton field guides.

The plates are the first thing anyone looks at in a new field guide. A mix of painters and styles—13 artists are represented here—can compromise the visual unity of a field guide, but Birds of Central Asia maintains a reasonable uniformity across its 143 plates. The quality of the plates is generally very good; a significant number are taken over from other guides, and some readers will recognize them. 

There are a few shortcomings. Some species appear to be very washed out. The illustrations of the Saxaul Sparrow, for example, look very bleached, and do not really convey the smart, snappy appearance of that species, which is much more accurately depicted in the cover illustration. The Wryneck and some of the doves are also unusually pale. In other instances, some of the colors are too strong; look at the very bright red on the grebes, for instance.  

I was disappointed to see one of the region’s truly special endemics, the Pander's Ground Jay, represented by just a small (and out of scale) illustration, almost as if an afterthought. Dwarfed by a huge magpie on the same plate, this species, I suspect, was painted especially for the book and then added to a plate from another source. The text’s account of the ground jay is also disappointingly brief.  Although it does mention the very isolated and hard-to-see Kazakh race ilensis, nothing is said of the plumage differences between the nominate race and the darker, larger ilensis with its more extensive breast mark.  

On the first of the sparrow plates, the House Sparrow is much too bright, especially on the cheeks, which are actually quite gray. The female Zarudny’s Sparrow is, to my eye, also much too strongly marked; although the female of this species is patterned basically like the male (unlike her plain North African counterpart), she is much paler and more washed out than shown here. These are small points, though, in what is generally an excellent collection of illustrations.

These days, after the illustrations, it is the taxonomy of any new guide that is subjected to the greatest scrutiny. In an age of rapid and often radical change, this branch of our hobby inevitably poses challenges for authors—and for us mere birdwatchers as we try to keep up.

Birds of Central Asia follows Howard and Moore (2003), with some deviation where the authors found it appropriate. As has long been urged by Central Asian ornithologists, the migratory taxa once assigned to the House Sparrow have now been split as the Indian Sparrow. It is also pleasing to see the Central Asian counterpart of the Desert Sparrow finally accorded full species status and named in honor of the great Ukrainian ornithologist Nikolai Zarudny. This population, which occupies a very restricted range, is in desperate need of the further study that its elevation to species status should encourage.

The Asian Desert Warbler is split from its North African cousins, and the guide includes the recently rediscovered Large-billed Reed Warbler; that species’ breeding range has been placed in the southern portions of Central Asia, but it could be more widespread than currently believed, a good reason for birders to pay closer attention to all those Blyth’s Reed Warblers. The Booted, Sykes's, and Eastern Olivaceous Warblers are moved from Hippolais to Iduna, an innovation (following Howard and Moore) that may be harder for some of us to come to terms with. The Indian Golden Oriole, perhaps overlooked by some visitors in the past, is also listed as a full species. Sadly, there is no suggestion of a split for the regional population of the Crimson-winged Finch.

There are some "losses." Birders who have visited Central Asia in the past will discover that they have “lost” both the Turkestan Tit, placed within the Great Tit complex, and the delightful Yellow-breasted Tit, to be found among the Azure Tits. 

Anyone who has birded the semi-steppe deserts has seen many Lesser Short-toed Larks—or so we thought. Because Howard and Moore assigns the Central Asian taxa heinei and leucophaea not to that species but to the Asian Short-toed Lark, the Lesser does not appear in the book at all, a bit of a shock to those of us who have been entering it on our checklists for the past 20 years. At the same time, the guide’s taxonomic introduction tells us that (frustratingly) unpublished data suggest that heinei and leucophaea are in fact distinct from the Asian Short-toed Lark, either belonging to the Lesser Short-taoed Lark after all—or forming a separate species of their own. In their Birds of Kazakhstan (2007), Arend Wassink and Gerald Oreel call “the status of Asian Short-toed Lark in Kazakhstan…uncertain” and note that “recent trips to the supposed breeding range in Kazakhstan did not result in finding any”; until this complicated situation becomes clearer, it might have been better simply to leave us with the plain Lesser Short-toed Lark. 

Birds of Central Asia treats two populations of the Isabelline Shrike as separate species, the Turkestan and the Daurian Shrikes. Over the years, I have seen a bewildering array of Isabelline Shrike plumages in the region, some of which are sometimes referred to as karelini. This guide tells us that such birds are probably the products of hybridization between Turkestan and Red-backed Shrikes, an explanation that I feel oversimplifies the situation: I am not sure that anyone knows for sure the origins of karelini.  Similarly, the treatment of the large gray shrikes will raise a few eyebrows; here too, the book could be accused of simplifying the true picture.  

But simplification may, of course, be exactly what is needed in the complex and often confusing world of taxonomy, and perhaps this book is to be applauded for coming down off the fence on some issues—even if it does not happen to land on the side you are on. If nothing else, it will prompt debate.

Whatever your taxonomic views, there is no doubt that this is a valuable and much-needed book, one that very neatly fills a hole in the bibliography of Palearctic birding and has instantly become the standard guide to the region.

- Steve Rooke is the Managing Director of Sunbird, and leads tours for that company and for WINGS to Vietnam, Georgia, Cyprus, Central Asia, South Africa, and Ethiopia. Rooke has a wide range of interests outside of birding, not the least of which is cooking.

Recommended citation:

Rooke, S. 2013. A New Standard for the 'Stans [a review of Birds of Central Asia, by Raffael Ayé, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth]. Birding 45(2):65.

Dunne, Sibley, and Sutton: Hawks in Flight

Hawks in Flight, second edition

by Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

335 pages, $26–hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13648

 

Brian Sullivan reviews the new edition of a classic:

As a young hawk watcher at Cape May in the early 1990s, I thought the authors of Hawks in Flight were magicians. Pulling identifications out of thin air, they put names to raptors at the outermost limits of vision, recognizing patterns and keying in on subtleties of shape and flight style. At first I was incredulous: There was no way they could be getting every bird. But time after time, as distant hawks and falcons approached and finally showed their classic “field marks,” these guys were right. It wasn’t long before I was absorbing everything I could from them: It was the Cape May School of Bird Identification, and class was in session! I would never look at birds the same way again.

The first edition of Hawks in Flight was published in 1988. Modeled on Richard F. Porter and coauthors’ Flight Identification of European Raptors, this book for the first time showed North American raptors as birders could expect to see them in the field; even better, Hawks in Flight provided what was perhaps the first truly engaging writing on the topic, describing raptors in colorful and memorable phrases and boiling down field marks to their essential components. Hawks in Flight became my bible, and I went to church a lot, studying every word and line drawing. To this day, I still hear Pete Dunne’s words each time I see a Merlin dashing past like a Harley Davidson or an American Kestrel gliding by like a scooter.

It was with great excitement that I opened the long-awaited second edition of this masterly work, poring over the pages like a kid on Christmas morning. This new edition is a marked improvement visually, thanks to the addition of a suite of color photos illustrating each species (the original edition’s illustrations were all black and white). And by adding eleven range-restricted species to the twenty-three more widespread species treated in the first edition, the second now includes all the breeding raptors of North America north of Mexico, offering valuable information for the identification of a number of birds not often seen by most hawk watchers.

Digging deeper, I was happy to see that most of Pete Dunne’s witty and unique text has been retained. All of the species accounts have been edited and updated, sometimes at a slight cost to the original book’s distinctive style; though the revised accounts temper some of the original book’s more colorful statements—in some cases with good reason, in some cases probably not—the prose is still engaging, memorable, and informative, three qualities not often found together in bird books. Few writers can match Dunne’s cleverness in writing about birds, and I was glad to see that most of the lines that stuck with me twenty years ago are still there. I won’t be alone in that assessment: It’s common at hawk watches to hear observers reciting lines from the original Hawks in Flight.

David Sibley has contributed black and white line drawings to both editions; in another context, that medium might seem a bit dated, but in the case of hawk identification, colors and the intricacies of plumage are often less informative than are general patterns of dark and light or an unknown bird’s shape and flight style. Sibley’s drawings nearly always hit the mark, and I was glad to find that some that were slightly off in the first edition have been updated for this second: Compare, for example, his treatment of the upperparts of the juvenile Northern Goshawk, where the critical tawny mottling on the upperwing coverts, missing from the original edition, is now shown perfectly. Most species are illustrated in adult and juvenile plumages, and some are depicted in a range of morphs and geographic variations. Where these drawings excel is in communicating what the birds really look like in the field; with few exceptions, the shapes are right on, and Sibley’s rough vignettes showing species in direct comparison are certainly a highlight of the book.

The most obvious visual improvement in the new edition is the color photographs. A few full-frame portraits are interspersed throughout the book to add curb appeal, but the real contribution made by the new photo material is to the species accounts. Where the first edition tucked its black and white photos into the back of the book, the new edition ends each species account with a selection of color images depicting a goodly range of variation in shapes and flight postures. Each photo caption identifies the bird’s age, sex, and subspecies wherever possible and appropriate. This is a great upgrade overall, though the occasional off-center or oddly sized images and poor use of page space are perplexing.

Any book as full of information and detail as this will inevitably contain a few errors. There are a few typos throughout the text, and it’s not hard to find mistakes in the captions’ assignment of age and sex (the color photo of an adult Gyrfalcon on p. 147, for example, is erroneously labeled juvenile). Even the worst errors here are relatively minor, but they will lead the inexperienced reader to make mistakes.

Nonetheless, Hawks in Flight excels in teaching birders to identify raptors to the species level. While it understates some of the more complex challenges, the real key here is in any case getting the species right; across the entire range of the Red-tailed Hawk, to take a familiar example, 99% of birds of that species will be identifiable using the set of basic characters presented here to full satisfaction.

Where there is cause for significant complaint is in the book’s tendency to oversimplify complex topics such as geographic variation and aging. If we’ve learned anything in the twenty years since Hawks in Flight was first published, it’s that many birds don’t fit the mold. A simplified approach to complex matters can lead to misinformation and confusion. Taking as just one example the book’s discussion of a species I know well, the Red-tailed Hawk, we find misleading generalizations about subspecies; even though the reader is reminded that there are caveats, the treatment remains questionable. For instance, the subspecies Buteo jamaicensis “abietinus” is here designated the “Eastern Canadian Red-tailed Hawk,” even though this poorly understood population—currently lumped by most authors with B. j. borealis, the Eastern Red-tailed Hawk—was in fact described from the northern Canadian spruce-fir forest west to Alberta, not necessarily the eastern portion of it, and its scientific name is actually B. j. abieticola.

The mere mention of this population here is confusing, as are the statements justifying the book’s exclusion of two subspecies: “The Pacific Coast and Florida Red-tailed … share plumage characteristics that are fundamentally similar to the basic Eastern or light-morph Western Red-tailed Hawks.” In reality, these two subspecies are quite different from both Eastern and Western Red-tails, but little has been published about them, making them harder to deal with than the better-known subspecies.

The treatment of the Harlan’s Red-tailed Hawk, largely correct at its core, also introduces many inaccuracies. Our understanding of this taxon is still evolving, but statements such as “the back and upperparts are blackish (not brown)” are incorrect: Many are brown-backed, especially in summer. The barred outer primaries that are such a great field mark for juvenile Harlan’s are inaccurately described here as characteristic of adults—but all adult Red-tailed Hawks have similar variably patterned outer primaries. The book also mentions the “curious gray patterning on the flight feathers” of a light-morph adult Harlan’s (photo 21), but rather than pointing out that patterning as the excellent field mark that it is, the photo caption gives the impression that it is an anomaly. And oversimplified descriptions of tail patterns, such as “Westerns have banded tails and Easterns don’t,” are simply relics: We know today that many Westerns have plain tails that are identical to those of typical Easterns (as photo 7 plainly shows), and vice versa. Categorical statements to the contrary result in errors in the field, and tempt observers to assign birds to subspecies without a firm understanding of the complexity of the issue.

My concluding thoughts are simple. The second edition of Hawks in Flight stands alone in its ability to connect people with raptors. By boiling in-flight identification down to its essence, it helps birders learn to see field marks that lie beyond plumage details. It is not enough to say that every hawk watcher should have this book on his or her shelf; every birder should have this book at hand, as the skills and techniques found here can be applied to all types of birding, helping birders like me move toward more advanced levels of field identification.

Brian Sullivan

Carmel Valley, California

[email protected]

- Brian Sullivan is eBird Project Leader at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Photo Editor for BNA Online and for the ABA’s North American Birds, and co-author of the forthcoming Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. His research interests include migration, conservation, and field identification, especially of seabirds and raptors.