Why Birding-aus?
Well, at the risk of sounding like Philip Adams, it?s one long conversation.
Personally I enjoy it all, almost (there are a few names I have blocked),
and some days I enjoy the trip reports, other days the fights, and the
jokes, but I always enjoy genuine information the best.
One thing which I think we could do more often is to post notices of books
we have read; I attach one notice below. If we could this more regularly
then it would a great service to other birders, I think, and help us decided
which books we want to buy, which put down on the list of books to get from
the library or which to avoid.
Anyway:
The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Mayr and Diamond, OUP 2001
People might expect this weighty tome to be some sort of field guide to the
region covered (Solomons and the Bismarcks (New Ireland and New Britain and
smaller islands). In fact it isn?t and it doesn?t set out to be. However it
does contain some beautiful plates of regional endemics and subspecific
variation in some species (honeyeaters, white-eyes and monarch flycatchers
&c), which illustrate nearly all the endemic species of the area, and it has
a very detailed species list, with island-by-island details of the
distributions of the various taxa, species and subspecies, so that, taken in
conjunction with Beehler et al (Birds of New Guinea) and the Doughty
Solomons Field Guide, it does ?cover? the area, and cover the Bismarcks,
which Doughty doesn?t.
However the main point of the book is a long and detailed exposition of the
Biological Species Concept, first articulated as such by the young Mayr in
the 1940s, with illustrations of its features from the region. This will
probably be a work that will be extensively cited in the future in works
concerned with speciation and species concepts. I found the arguments very
clear and convincing, and I was only put off by a couple of features,
firstly the fact that Diamond and Mayr use no English names at all (but I
suppose to invent English names for dozens of subspecies would be equally
confusing), and the complicated hierarchy of taxonomic descriptions they
use: superspecies, species, allospecies, megasubspecies, subspecies &c,
(have I got that right?), or notation like Cacatua [alba], for the
superspecies. But then these are integral to their argument as well, I
suppose.
I suspect that this is a book that experts on the area will want to purchase
straight away, but the large price tag (AUS$ 120) will probably mean that
most birders will wait till they can get a library copy, to read it for its
contribution to theories of species and speciation.
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John Leonard (Dr)
http://users.bigpond.com/john.leonard
PO Box 243, Woden, ACT 2606, Australia
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