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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.

 

Living With Shorebirds

A review by Rick Wright

Epic Journeys, by Shawn Carey

Migration Productions, 2012

34 minutes, $20.00—DVD

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13814

The wildest of birds are the shorebirds, long-winged spirits of marsh and beach and prairie. For tens of thousands of years, the lives of migrant waders and the lives of North America's human inhabitants intersected only briefly and casually: Even the devastating slaughters of the nineteenth century, when gunners shipped carloads of plovers, godwits, and tiny short-billed curlews to eastern cities, were limited to those few days a year when the migrants, some of them coming from as far as Tierra del Fuego, paused on their way to the boreal forests and the Arctic.    

Dying at the hands of the market hunters was bad enough, of course, but living with us here in the early twenty-first century is no picnic on the beach, either. Dunes and mudflats, once "wastelands" left to the birds, the crabs, and the goldenrod, are now real estate, and human fishermen even compete for shorebird food in the waters of Delaware Bay. 

Shawn Carey, whose Migration Productions has also given us the fine Looking Skyward, explores these problems in a new and visually spectacular short film, Epic Journeys. Focusing on three signature species of the east coast of the US and Canada, the video asks how we can learn to share the shoreline with its wild inhabitants—and offers some encouragingly hopeful answers.     

The current poster bird for shorebird conservation is the Red Knot, whose west Atlantic population has declined precipitously in just a short generation, victim of a bizarre and human-induced food shortage in Delaware Bay, where most of the birds stage on the northbound flight each May. For millennia, Red Knots, Semipalmated Sandpipers, Sanderlings, Ruddy Turnstones, and Laughing Gulls feasted every spring on the billions and billions of eggs laid by horseshoe crabs, waxing fat for the breeding season ahead. Those same "crabs"—actually more closely related to arachnids than to the familiar fiddlers and ghosts—are also, wouldn't you know it, a convenient source of bait for the eel fishery, and in the 1980s and 1990s, the human harvest began to depress the population, resulting in fewer horseshoe crab eggs, resulting in skinnier shorebirds, resulting in less recruitment, resulting in the loss of up to 90% of the world's population of rufa Red Knots. 

The film rehearses this sad story in short interviews with prominent ornithologists and bird conservationists, many of them well known to ABA birders. Dire as the situation seems, the experts remain hopeful: As more and more people learn about these birds, more and more care about their plight. And the recent strict regulation of crab harvesting, including a moratorium in several states, seems to have had a positive effect already, with this week's counts on the Delaware Bayshore showing notable gains over those from last year.  

Piping Plovers nesting on the coast of eastern Massachusetts face a different challenge. "Pale as a beach flea," these unassuming little shorebirds breed and feed on the same white-sand beaches where people love to play. Ornithologists, conservationists, and hordes of volunteers have dedicated untold days to convincing the taste-like-chicken crowd that there is room for both birds and recreation, and the symbolic fencing and tireless talking have worked. By the late 1980s, careless picknickers, dogwalkers, and beach drivers had reduced the state's entire breeding population to just 126 pairs. Now, thirty-five years later, nearly 1200 birds lay eggs on Massachusetts beaches, proof that people and plovers can indeed co-exist on these narrow strips of sand.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in the past twenty years has heard of knots and plovers. The Semipalmated Sandpiper, on the other hand, is a true birder's bird. Still one of the most abundant shorebirds in the world, this species stages in awesome numbers on the mudflats of the Bay of Fundy, where flocks of up to 300,000—some 75% of the bird's global population—fly to roost in vast rolling waves, then spread out to feed on the wide mudflats exposed by the receding tide. Like the springtime knots of Delaware Bay, the southbound sandpipers are laying on fuel for the long days ahead, which will take them from eastern Canada to the wintering grounds in South America in a single flight.

The sheer size of these dazzling flocks makes it hard to imagine a world without Semipalmated Sandpipers, but we've learned the hard way that mere abundance is no guarantee of survival. New Brunswick conservationists have constructed viewing platforms and visitor centers to educate birders and the curious public about the sandpipers' needs and the harm that even the most innocent disturbance can cause; thanks to their efforts, we can hope to pass one of North America's most captivating wildlife spectacles on to the next generation.

One of the young Canadian biologists in the film explains why we should care about the annual gathering in the Bay of Fundy:

This is a community. Corophium and the snails and the birds and the Peregrine Falcons that come and feed on the birds all live together and they all require each other to survive. If there are no sandpipers, the Peregrine Falcons don't have food. If there's no corophium, the sandpipers can't come and forage here. So any development that takes place that can affect these habitats, anything people do, whether it's going down and disturbing the birds or developing an area and putting in houses, all of these things can affect this habitat, and it's important in the grand scheme of things because it's a whole community.

The great good news in Carey's film is that a little thought and a little caring can make us, too, part of that community. We can learn to co-exist with these wildest and most vulnerable of birds, and our beaches, our mudflats, and our lives can be the richer for it.

Recommended citation:

Wright, R. 2013. Living With Shorebirds [a review of Epic Journeys, by Shawn Carey]. Birding 45(4):68.

Behind Museum Doors

A review by Julia Zarankin

The Owl That Fell From the Sky: Stories of a Museum Curator, by Brian Gill

Awa Press, 2012

152 pages, $23.99—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13913

The curious visitor to a museum filled with zoological specimens and curiosities has to wonder: Who are the people who organize these collections? What stories do the collections tell? What makes them relevant?

And what happens in natural history museums behind closed doors?

Brian Gill’s Owl that Fell from the Sky takes the reader on a riveting journey into the rarefied world of a natural history museum. The curator of birds and other land vertebrates at the Auckland Museum, Gill provides a luminous, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the workings of a collection that contains thousands of avian specimens, including copious bones, study skins , and the eggs of extinct birds.

Gill doesn’t hide or apologize for the strangeness of his world. On the contrary, the book celebrates the fact that the seemingly outlandish, obsessively documented objects that make up a natural history collection are actually closer to our everyday than we could have imagined.

The Owl that Fell from the Sky presents fifteen anecdotal essays about the histories of the curious objects held in New Zealand collections, ranging from a gigantic stuffed elephant named Rajah to an enormous moa egg and a tortoise allegedly given as a gift by Captain Cook. The author weaves those anecdotes into a larger narrative thread that emphasizes how museums preserve a record not only of individual memory, but also of the biodiversity of our planet.

In his introduction, Gill affirms that “as natural history collections grow, they become directories of animals and plants that have lived in different areas at different times, and may hold the key to how characteristics and distributions of species have varied with place and changed with time.” Museums are not just repositories of curiosities and dusty storage spaces full of obsessively catalogued information; they “help us understand life on earth in all its exuberant diversity—and understanding nature is a crucial step toward protecting it.”

Gill points out that natural history museums could not meet that lofty goal without the input of the public. “An unexpected telephone call or visitor, heralding what may be a rare or unusual find, adds spice to the natural history curator’s day.” It is this community involvement—and the conversations it ignites—that bring the essays in this book to life.

Today, museums big and small all over the world depend in part on specimens salvaged by birders, and some of those finds lead to surprising discoveries. A “strange white bird” delivered by a young girl to the Auckland museum turned out to be a vagrant Barn Owl—only the fourth ever reported in New Zealand. What follows the arrival of the mysterious owl is detective work at its best. The reader accompanies Gill as he conducts a postmortem examination and consults an entomologist after discovering an accidentally swallowed ant in the bird’s gizzard. The ant turns out to be endemic to Australia, a fact that both solves the mystery and gives the book its title: The owl was probably hunting near an Australian airport, roosted in the undercarriage of an airplane, and dropped to its death as the plane landed in New Zealand.

Some inquiries from the public verge on the surreal. Although bird identifications predominate, Gill is often asked to identify “dinosaur” bones, which usually turn out to be whale or horse bones. One anxious caller assumed that Gill would be able to identify a bird based on the similarity of its song to “a phrase in the third movement of Bruch’s violin concerto.” The questioners range as widely as the questions, from urban planners to students working on science projects to the speechwriter who desperately needs to know whether kiwis mate for life.

One of the heroes of this book is Thomas Cheeseman, a self-taught natural historian who spent nearly half a century as curator of the Auckland museum. As we follow Cheeseman’s career from from 1874 to 1923, we see the city and its museum transformed into a professional institution in a budding colonial capital.

The essays revolving around Cheeseman’s contributions remind us that museums are anything but stagnant; in fact, the specimens that make up collections often circumnavigate the world before ending up in a museum. Thanks to Cheeseman’s exchanges with far-flung institutions, the Auckland museum has ended up with birds from Siberia, China, and Sulawesi—and in return, museums across the world hold specimens from New Zealand. The tiny skin of a Black-thighed Falconet, for example, arrived in New Zealand on a particularly circuitous route, traveling from New Guinea to Auckland by way of Italy.

What makes The Owl that Fell from the Sky such a lively read is that Brian Gill invites his reader to witness and participate in the work of his museum. We follow a taxidermist in his meticulous and slightly gory preparation of a nearly 9,000-pound elephant for display; we are privy to how the author himself skeletonizes an albatross, a Mute Swan, and two wallabies by burying them in his compost pile (with “worthwhile results”); we watch a talented young American prepare a terrifyingly vivid diorama of a Kea pecking at a bloody lamb.

Like the collections he describes, Gill’s prose is filled with wondrous and surprising detail. Names, dates, scientific information—including a fascinating excursus on the requirements of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature—and historical factoids fly at the reader quickly, voluminously, and sometimes out of left field. I found myself underlining and taking notes simultaneously, and almost always wanting more.

On the one hand, I wished that Gill would slow down and dwell longer on the historical details, but on the other, I realized that the book’s design was different. The exuberant tempo of the historical background information builds toward Gill’s principal point, that natural history museum collections are modern—rather than arcane—institutions in the service of science and humanity. For instance, museum specimens can help biosecurity officers identify unknown and perhaps unwanted animals. Though stereotypes of the curmudgeonly, obsessive curator abound, Gill shows us another side of his profession: endless curiosity and remarkable knowledge coupled with a humble desire to learn more and to ask more questions, and a decidedly quirky sense of humor.

The journeys of the objects and specimens themselves are often action-packed, and the stories they tell vivid and related with compassion. In a particularly moving passage, Gill follows the trajectory of the New Zealand skins sent by Cheeseman to a Florentine museum. Those birds "survived the turmoil of one hundred and twenty years of Italian history,” and were still lying on their backs in the drawers when in August 1944 New Zealand Army units entered a newly liberated Florence. History, both individual and collective, is woven into the narrative told by the objects in a museum collection.

Gill’s book demands some work of its reader. The book lacks an overarching narrative or any kind of summing-up. Though I would have appreciated a bit more commentary from the author—and perhaps a conclusion—I realize that what Gill has done here is to emulate the very spirit of a museum collection, which urges the viewer to connect the dots and to shape meaning out of the discrete elements of a collection. We construct our own narrative based on the stories he has given us. In a sense, the stories Gill tells are simple, but they reveal a deeper concern about the ethical imperative to record and to remember, and a full awareness of the uncanny ability of objects to tell stories.

- Julia Zarankin is on her way to becoming a birder. In her other life, she is a writer, editor, writing coach, and lecturer to later-life learners in Toronto. In her former life, she worked as a professor of Russian literature and culture at the University of Missouri. She blogs regularly about birds, words, and other essential matters at Ontario Nature.

Recommended citation:

Zarankin, J. 2013. Behind Museum Doors [a review of The Owl That Fell From the Sky, by Brian Gill]. Birding 45(4):67.

Right Brain, Left Brain, Crossed Eyes

A review by Soheil Zendeh

The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors, by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, and Brian Sullivan

Princeton University Press, 2013

286 pages, $29.95—flexi-cover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13876

Roger Tory Peterson taught us to look for field marks. He pasted those little arrows into his illustrations, and presto: The whole world of the field guide was transformed.

Thanks in part to Peterson’s slender arrows, most of us assume that there will always be diagnostic marks that, if we know what they are, will help us instantly identify a new birds or mammal or amphibian or butterfly. But when it comes to animals we are already familiar with, we can forgo looking for such marks. Just as I recognize my son from blocks away not by any particular field mark but by the whole aspect ("gestalt") he presents, we know familiar birds immediately without realizing which field marks we’ve used—or, indeed, without using any at all.  

Those different ways of recognizing could be seen as differences between left-brain (verbal, digital) and right-brain (non-verbal, analog) cognition. Most of us, I’d venture to say, try to learn new ideas, concepts, and things using our left brain; but then, after a while, the automatic pattern-recognition and analog part, the right brain, takes over, and we become unaware of how we recognize the familiar.

Richard Crossley comes to us and asks, "Can you describe a Blue Jay?" Can you? To be able to say whether a Blue Jay has white wing bars, or black on the face, is to have a verbal description of the bird. Crossley says, "Write down the description so you'll know the bird, not the identification." What he means, I think, is, "Learn the whole bird, not just its field marks. But learn the whole bird in verbal detail." And to help us do it, he invented a new type of field guide. The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds, published in 2011, is now followed by Raptors.

Crossley’s system dispenses with individual illustrations and field mark arrows. Instead, for each species he gives us a large—sometimes enormous—canvas with multiple photographic images of a bird at different distances, in different lighting conditions, in multiple poses, sometimes associating with others of its kind, sometimes pursuing prey or being pursued by a predator. In Raptors, each species has at least one two-page spread, some much more: Our eagles, for example, are given five full openings.

There is visual grandeur in these images. Crossley is the photographer and the Photoshop wizard, and his compositions are intended to give the impression of seeing a bird in its natural setting. The idea is that if you see images of the bird over and over again in its usual surroundings, you'll learn its gestalt and learn to recognize the species in the flesh.

I get this. That's how I learn. It's right-brain, non-verbal, analog. I think a lot of us birders learn identification this way.

But I'm not sure that learning to call a species by gestalt helps if you then want to describe the bird in a left-brain, verbal, digital way. Remember those ornithological tomes that provide detailed descriptions of every feather tract of every age and both sexes of each species? I blank out on those. What I want is to have Roger Tory Peterson come along with his arrows and point me to the part of the description that is diagnostic.

It seems to me that the really top birders do both: They work instantly with gestalt, but they also have the ability to verbalize what they are seeing. Even after the bird has left their view, its image can be recalled by the left side of the brain and converted into a verbal description. It's taken me a long time to realize this about myself, but I can't do that. I know what a Black-bellied Plover or a Golden Eagle or a Warbling Vireo is when I see one, but I can't tell you in any detail how I know it.

By placing each bird in context, the images in Raptors provide far more information than those staged paintings in older-style books. Yet as my mind and my eyes wander the beautiful images, I feel lost without an all-powerful guide telling me what field mark to look for. I miss those silly little arrows.

Each spread of images here is accompanied by a short commentary. More extensive but still concise texts fill the second half of the book. Written by Jerry Liguori and Brian Sullivan, two heavyweights in the field of hawk identification, these descriptions are organized into a standard series of topics: overview, flight style, size and shape, plumage, geographic variation, molt, similar species, status and distribution, migration, and vocalization. In short, the text is encyclopedic. I doubt you'll have a raptor question that is not at least touched on. The section covering geographic variation in the Red-tailed Hawk takes up more than two full pages—as it should! Topics such as eagle plumages, Sharp-shinned and Cooper's Hawk identification, and geographic variation in the Red-shouldered Hawk are treated at length. In this section, the left brain reigns supreme.

Crossley may be a self-styled revolutionary when it comes to field guide design, but this book’s approach to classification is strictly old-school. All right, so it hardly matters when you're out in the field: this is an identification guide, not a taxonomic work. Of course it includes the New World vultures and California Condor (all in the family Cathartidae), which were at one point split from the rest of the diurnal raptors and placed with the storks. That has now been reversed, and the AOU Check-list once again places them in the same order as the eagles, kites, hawks and harriers—but not with the falcons, which now occupy their own, separate order and are thought to be more closely related to the parrots. There is no mention in Raptors of the research that has thus split up the traditional group. And truth be told, maybe that's a good thing. Who knows what the taxonomists will come up with tomorrow?

The book also ignores a significant thrust by Bill Clark, author of Hawks of North America in the Peterson series, to split the Harlan's and Krider's Hawks from the Red-tailed Hawk and to classify them as a distinct species, Buteo harlani, varying from very dark birds (traditionally called “Harlan’s”) to the lightest (“Krider’s”). Crossley et al. acknowledge none of this, and go with the traditional description of the Red-tailed Hawk as so varied that it can encompass such tremendously different types as Harlan's and Krider's. Crossley simply asserts that Krider's "has yet to be documented west of the Rocky Mountains," and encourages birders to think of a western red-tail with a whitish tail as a light-morph Harlan's. (No field guide so far has included Clarke's proposed split.)

Crossley has an additional trick up his sleeve, and it's a lengthy one. Out of 160 pages of photographs, fully 25 are mystery images: a page of Texas falcons, for example, or a two-page spread of perched buteos. The book challenges you to identify them all, and to age and sex them where possible. The answers, taking up 14 pages at the end of the book’s text section, briefly discuss each identification. This is almost too much fun. You might forget that you should be out there looking for real live birds, and instead spend your hours on the couch surfing the images.

In summary, Crossley's new book may leave you cross-eyed—but also visually stimulated. The various techniques and tricks he uses are meant to get your right brain and your left brain talking to each other. That may succeed with some people. I still like my field guides, like my gin, straight. But Crossley mixes it up, and who can resist?

- Raised in Tehran and Tangier, Soheil Zendeh arrived in Cambridge, MA, as a college freshman in 1961. He started birding in 1973, and is co-founder of the Friends of Belle Isle Marsh and the “Take a Second Look” (TASL) program. Zendeh has been taking part in the Great Basin winter raptor census and banding project since 2008. 

Recommended citation:

Zendeh, S. 2013. Right Brain, Left Brain, Crossed Eyes [a review of The Crossley Guide: Raptors, by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, and Brian Sullivan]. Birding 45(4):66.

 

 

Nova Scotia

A review by Nic Fieldsend

All the Birds of Nova Scotia: Status and Critical Identification, by Ian McLaren

Gaspereau Press, 2012

347 pages, $47.95—hardcover 

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13914

 

 I first arrived in Nova Scotia in the summer of 2010, and quickly became familiar with the name of Ian McLaren. This, I found out, was the person to call to arbitrate tough identification issues or to identify the distant bird in a blurry photo. Since then, my time in the field with him has only confirmed that McLaren is a font of ornithological knowledge, with a sharp eye for plumage variations and an equally sharp mind for the diagnostic features of any bird we encounter.

So it was with great expectations that I opened All the Birds of Nova Scotia, a book that local birders had been talking about for some time. The layout is easy on the eye, a nice selection of photographs breaks up the text, and the production quality from Gaspereau Press is of the handcrafted, award-winning caliber that we have come to expect from one of Canada’s most innovative publishers. But my first reaction was, “Is this it? Is this the sum total of knowledge about all the birds ever seen in Nova Scotia?” I was expecting a weighty tome for proud display on the coffee table, but this seemed to be little more than an annotated species list.

I didn’t need to delve much deeper before I began to appreciate the richness of the detail this book offers. The author’s stated goal is simple: to provide accounts of the status of all 486 species reported in the province of Nova Scotia up to the end of 2010. The accounts, which also treat distinctive subspecies, are preceded by an extended introduction, including a list of recommended identification guides and online resources; McLaren also provides an introduction to Nova Scotia’s geography and a discussion of how the province’s location makes it a prime site for migrants and vagrants.

As a relative newcomer to Atlantic Canada, I found the extensive section on weather systems and their influence on bird movements particularly interesting. McLaren uses data from specific Nova Scotia weather events, including some of the most notable hurricanes to hit these shores, to explain how to interpret forecasts to predict which species might turn up and where, giving his readers the tools to determine where and when we can hope for the best returns from our time in the field.

The status descriptions are easy to digest and very informative. Accounts vary in length: the House Sparrow, for example, widespread in most urban locations, warrants just a cursory paragraph, whereas the Red Crossbill, with its population variations, complex morphology, and irruptive behavior, is given two full pages that carefully highlight what to look for in each of the call types. The entries for birds that show significant racial or age-related variation, such as gulls and sparrows, are similarly detailed. Every account not only lists the subspecies seen in Nova Scotia, but also alerts birders to those races not yet recorded in the province that they should nevertheless look out for.

Many of McLaren’s species accounts go beyond temporal and spatial distribution to treat identification issues. Those discussions are illustrated by a range of carefully selected photographs; as the author notes, not all of the images are of award-winning quality, but their very realism makes them excellent practical aids to identification. Cropped insets highlight salient features, and side-by-side images allow direct comparison of similar species, including those where hybridization or geographic variation present special challenges, such as in the case of the Herring-Thayer’s-Kumlien’s-Iceland Gull complex. This approach to identification, using carefully annotated “everyday” photographs to simulate the experience of the observer in the field, makes All the Birds a valuable resource for all birders interested in the finer points of identification variation, whether we are located in Nova Scotia or not, inspiring us to greater thoroughness and a more critical approach in the field.

The book does have one significant limitation, the lack of a clearly presented overview of the actual numbers of the rarer birds observed in the province. Though specific records of vagrants are documented in extensive detail in the status accounts, it is hard to quickly compare the scarcity and frequency of different species or to get a sense of their vagrancy potential throughout the year. This difficulty could have been avoided with an appendix presenting the status of all the province’s species in tabular form, making it easier to compare their abundance and, within limits, to predict when a given bird might be more likely to turn up.

But that single flaw is far from fatal. For birders in Nova Scotia, All the Birds provides a comprehensive record of sightings to inform future observations. The book is even slightly prophetic: In the account of the Snow Goose, McLaren notes recent occurrences of the Ross’s Goose in other parts of the region, and indicates that Nova Scotia birders should be prepared to find the bird in their province, a prediction that came delightfully true earlier this year.

For the experienced birder anywhere in eastern North America, the level of detail this book presents is a joy, particularly the attention paid to distinguishing the races of widely distributed species and to better understanding subtle plumage and structural variations within a species. The information McLaren presents here will enliven, and sometimes settle, debates in living rooms and bird club meetings for years to come.

All the Birds also gives the new birder insight into a world informed by weather charts and identification guides, by field notes and fine plumage details, by oft-recalled red letter days and birds that had no right to turn up where they did. The product of the author’s lifetime of study and dedication, All the Birds offers something for everyone.

- Inheriting his father’s passion for birding, Nic Fieldsend spent his childhood exploring the estuaries and valleys of Devon and Cornwall in south west England. The sought-after prize in those early years was a windblown Nearctic migrant, making it somehow fitting that Fieldsend has himself been transported the other direction across the Atlantic, where he now birds around his current home in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Recommended citation:

Fieldsend, N. 2013. Nova Scotia [a review of All the Birds of Nova Scotia, by Ian McLaren]. 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.

Bird Books for Children

A review by Hannah Floyd

 

Song for Papa Crow

by Marit Menzin

Schiffer Publishing, 2012

32 pages, $16.99–hardcover

Nighthawk!

by Jamie Bastedo

Red Deer Press, 2013

245 pages, $12.95–softcover

 

In Marit Menzin's Song for Papa Crow (2012), a young crow "learns to appreciate his voice." The author of our review, Hannah Floyd, is doing the very same thing as she makes her debut here as the youngest writer yet to be published in the pages of Birding. I think you will agree that this second-grader's voice is already an appreciable one, and it comes through loud, clear, and unmistakable in both her writing-as-intellectual-pursuit and her writing-as-physical-activity. To preserve for our readers the powerful and disappearing unity of word and script, and to show how easy this reviewer has made her editor's task, we present Hannah's review in her own words, her own pictures, and her own hand.

- Rick Wright, Book Review Editor

I can't imagine why anyone would want to, but you can click here to read the very lightly edited transcript of the review.

 

Recommended citation:

Floyd, H. 2013. Bird Books for Children [a review of Song for Papa Crow, by Marit Menzin, and Nighthawk!, by Jamie Bastedo]. Birding 45(3):68.

Pitoreal

A review by Jim Williams

 

Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre

by Tim Gallagher

Atria Books, 2013

304 pages, $26–softcover

This is a book about another Tim Gallagher search for a bird long unseen. It’s a story of extreme birding—extreme in concept and in undertaking. It’s a story of a treasure hunt in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. It has danger, bad guys, and an old map.

You remember Tim. He’s the fellow who with a friend reported an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in an Arkansas swamp in 2004. Subsequently, Gallagher’s employer, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, brought dozens of people to Arkansas to continue the search. As chronicled in Gallagher's The Grail Bird (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), it was a successful effort. There were many more reports.

This new book is about the Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico, cousin to the Ivory-billed, but bigger: a woodpecker two feet long from tail to the end of its chisel bill.

Let’s make this point early: Ten words in to the book’s first sentence, Gallagher writes: “[T]here once lived a woodpecker…” Which does not slow him down a bit.

Gallagher's Grail Bird is a fine book about the Ivory-billed adventure . His subject then was current, in the news, a subject of debate. His new book, Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker through the Wild Sierra Madre, tells a different story, a different kind of story.

The Ivory-billed search began on a trail six days old. Gallagher followed a tip. The Imperial Woodpecker comes with no hot tips. Gallagher’s information on thinly possible sightings ranges in age from six years to six decades.

Gallagher is a man of dreams and firm beliefs, and his books, including The Grail Bird and the gripping memoir Falcon Fever (Houghton Mifflin 2008), identify him as a man of obsessions. He is not easily discouraged, and Imperial Dreams covers five woodpecker searches in the Sierra Madre, most extensively his final trip in 2010.

This is an adventure story as much as, or more than, it is a bird story. If you’ve ever hiked long and hard in search of a bird, been wet for days, slept on the ground, eaten poorly, you’ll relate to this tale. It is likely to exceed any memories of your own worst trip. Gallagher many times mentions encounters with narcotraficantes. They carry AK-47 rifles; this is their land.

You will learn a good deal about the Imperial Woodpecker. The book is a history of its habits, its habitats, and the people who have seen it. There is mention of the other Campephilus woodpeckers of Central and South America; our Ivory-billed was not the only child in that family.

There’s a chapter about the Apaches and their famous chief Geronimo, who once used these mountains as sanctuary. Consider him a good guy in this context: The danger of running into his band of followers kept settlers and loggers out of the area until the late 1930s. Loggers destroyed woodpecker habitat; settlers ate the birds.

Gallagher and his companions—most often Martjan Lammertink, the Campephilus woodpecker expert from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and always a Mexican guide or two—search out people, usually very old people, who have seen the Imperial. Residents call the bird pitoreal. The searchers follow stories and rumors, letters, and a map drawn by Mexican graduate students in the 1970s. The map came into the hands of David Allen, son of Cornell's own Arthur A. Allen, who gave it to Gallagher. The Allens had seen the woodpecker in the 1940s.

The map lacked an X-dig-here mark. Gallagher managed to find one of the grad students, then in his nineties. Age and a stroke had wiped his mind of woodpecker details.

None of what Gallagher and his companions were doing was simple or easy or, often, even safe. Deep into the 2010 trip, tight-roping his way along the rocky edge of a deep canyon, Gallagher reaches his limit. Soaked with sweat, vision blurred, gut knotted, heart first fluttering then pounding, he passes out and rolls off the edge. Ten feet down, he and his backpack are stopped by a small tree, the only thing for 50 feet fore or aft that could have kept him from splatting on the rocks an echo below.

They were heading for a mesa topped with old-growth pine, the disappearing habitat of the Imperial. Logging and people with guns who shot the birds for food or sport were, or possibly are, the survival problems. (Gallagher speculates that timber harvesters also shot the birds to be rid of that environmental conflict.) Atop the mesa, scanning the valley below for birds, their glasses pick up a neat rectangle of tended crop—opium poppies. They find these often, and the discoveries quicken their step.

I say “were or are” the problem because there is no problem if there are no Imperial Woodpeckers. Gallagher does not see one. He doesn’t hear one. He finds no conclusive sign. He writes of them in the past tense. But he hopes. The Sierra Madre region where this search is centered held the birds, and it is huge, about 90,000 square miles. Its basic inaccessibility makes Arkansas or Louisiana swamps look like parkland. It’s like the Ivory-billed story was for years and years: It’s hard to prove a negative.

If you want to see the bird yourself, there is a film, made in 1956 by a dentist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, named William Rhein. On the last of his four trips into the Sierra, he shot 85 seconds of 16mm film of the bird. He kept the film to himself because its quality did not meet his standards. It was found some years ago thanks to Lammertink’s detective work. Eventually, it was given to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

A realist, Gallagher ends the book with hopeful comments on changes made by the Mexican government that might improve Sierra Madre conservation and reduce the presence of drug gangsters. He also gives this cautionary note: If you want to continue the search yourself, "you stand a far better chance of getting killed in the Sierra Madre now than of ever seeing a pitoreal.”

- Jim Williams writes about birds for the Minneapolis StarTribune. He also does bird photography and writes a birding blog for the paper. He was associate editor of Birding from 1998 to 2003. Most of his birding is done in his Minnesota neighborhood.

Recommended citation:

Williams, J. 2013. Pitoreal [a review of Imperial Dreams, by Tim Gallagher]. Birding 45(3):66.