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THE WILSON JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY • Vo/. 123, No. 1, March 2011 
the West Indies. No mention is made of the human/ 
bird interface in the Hawaiian Islands that resulted 
in the extinction of birds nearly as spectacular and 
peculiar as those of New Zealand. 
As hinted above, poor or idiosyncratic writing 
hinders communication throughout the book. One 
of my peeves is the pernicious and often 
seemingly affected substitution of “which” for 
“that.” Though by no means the only transgres¬ 
sors, the Brits are among the greatest sinners in 
this practice and Sarjeantson is the worst I have 
ever encountered. The word “that” has been 
totally abrogated in this book and is not used, 
except when utterly unavoidable. The most 
glaring example is the last sentence on page 19 
where “which” appears six times, all but five of 
which should have been “that” according to the 
standards of Bernstein {The Careful Writer , 1965). 
Pronouns with ambiguous or distant antecedents 
are another cause of poor writing. One has to 
backtrack through live sentences to discover that 
the last “it” in the paragraph spanning pages 50- 
51 refers to medullary bone. Can anyone figure 
out what the following sentence means? “Ireland 
has more than one tenth as many records of open 
ground species and water-birds as Britain and a 
similar number of woodland birds but fewer than 
4 per cent as many records of owls” (page 367). 
Peculiar turns of phrase are “during the time of 
lay” rather than “laying” (page 49 and else¬ 
where), and repeated statements that various kinds 
of artifacts were made “on” a given kind of bone 
when of or “from" would normally be used. 
The extensive bibliography, although not com¬ 
prehensive, includes many references that the 
ornithologist would probably never encounter. 
Many of these, in addition to being obscure, 
border on, or fall squarely within, the category of 
gray literature, which does not seem to create 
the kind of discomfort and skepticism among 
anthropologists that it does for most biologists. 
There are errors in the bibliography as well. 
Bickart is consistently misspelled Bickhart here 
and in the text. At least one reference is glaringly 
misalphabetized. 
To be fair, there is a lot of information in this 
ook that has not been summarized in any other 
source of which I am aware. The researcher 
should be forewarned that this information can at 
times be erroneous or incomplete. Personally I 
would not cite any fact from this book without 
going back to the original literature, which in 
many cases would probably prove very difficult to 
do. Nevertheless, the book represents a first 
source that one may turn to try to get a start on 
any subject involving avian zooarcheology or the 
history of human/bird interactions. An expanded 
and corrected edition would be a primary asset in 
any ornithological library.—STORRS L. OLSON, 
Curator Emeritus, Division of Birds, National 
Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Insti¬ 
tution, Washington, D.C. 20560, USA; e-mail: 
olsons@si.edu 
THE STATUS OF BIRDS IN BRITAIN & 
IRELAND. By David T. Parkin and Alan G. 
Knox. Christopher Helm, London, England. 2010: 
440 pages and 86 color illustrations. ISBN: 978-1- 
4081-2500-7. £50 (hard cover).—This volume 
updates a 1971 review by the same name, 
covering 580 species instead of the 466 of the 
earlier one. The 25% increase reflects both 
taxonomic changes and, primarily, new distribu¬ 
tional information. 
The well written Introduction is important fora 
full understanding of the species accounts. This 
includes sections on Geography and Climate, 
Flora and Vegetation, and Geographic Divisions 
and Habitats that provide the basis for the 
ecological distribution of the birds. A section on 
the Structure of Ornithology treats key organiza¬ 
tions, coordinated fieldwork, and publications, 
showing how the knowledge of bird distribution 
and abundance has been developed and is being 
sustained. Notably lacking in this section is any 
mention of the great museum collections that 
provide vouchers for much of the accumulated 
knowledge. A section on Evolution and Taxono¬ 
my emphasizes modem molecular analyses with a 
discussion of subspecies. There is a thorough 
section on Migration and Movement, one on 
Biogeographical Affinities, and a final one on 
Conservation. Information in all these sections 
relates to points made in the species accounts. The 
carefully selected 86 color photos on 32 pages 
illustrate points made in the introductory text or in 
species accounts. 
Each species account includes paragraphs on 
Taxonomy, Distribution, and Status. The first 
may discuss relationships within the family or 
genus, and the number of subspecies worldwide, 
citing evidence from recent morphologic or 
molecular studies. In a number of instances, 
however, taxonomic changes suggested by the 
molecular evidence discussed have not been 
