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THE WILSON JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY • Vol 123. No. 4. December 2011 
at the header and footer. To be fair, this is really 
only a problem for species-rich groups, namely 
hummingbirds and flycatchers; for nearly all other 
families, users won't be subject to excessive page¬ 
flipping. 
We have yet to see in the Neotropics what I 
consider a third generation field guide, exempli¬ 
fied by David Sibley's National Audubon Society: 
The Sibley Guide to Birds (2000, Alfred A. 
Knopf). Such a guide would include male, female, 
and immature plumages of all subspecies and 
racial variants-perhaps the only effective way to 
draw attention to the hidden diversity obfuscated 
by current taxonomy of Neotropic birds. Yet one 
shudders to think of the size Of such a book, even 
for a small Neotropic country such as Panama. 
Rumor has it that Angchr, Dean, and Zona 
Tropical/Cornell University are contemplating a 
version of the Panama field guide for tablet 
computers. Leapfrog development, such as skip¬ 
ping over the installation of landlines for cellular 
phone networks, is common in the developing 
world. I encourage the authors and publishers to 
stand firmly on the excellent foundation that is 
The Birds of Panama: .A Field Guide and take that 
leap.—MATTHEW J. MILLER. Smithsonian 
Tropical Research Institute, Apaitado Postal 
0843-03092 Panama, Reptiblica de Panamii; 
e-mail: millerma@si.edu 
SECOND ATLAS OF THE BREEDING 
BIRDS OF MARYLAND AND THE DISTRICT 
OF COLUMBIA. Edited by Walter G. Ellison. 
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 
Maryland, USA. 2010: 520 pages. ISBN: 978-0- 
8018-9576-0. S75.00 (cloth).—Nowhere is the 
maturation of the modern American birding 
community more evident than in the current 
‘second wave’ of bird aliasing in several U.S. 
states and counties, as well as in parts of Canada. 
Even before its first bird atlas effort was complete 
in 1987 (published in 1996), the Maryland 
Ornithological Society's Atlas Committee real¬ 
ized that rapid changes in the status and 
distribution of many bird species were occurring, 
and the time to begin a second effort was only a 
few years away. Planning for this second effort 
began as soon as the first had concluded, and this 
atlas work was conducted during 2002-2006. 
The late 20th century had seen not just a 
tremendous boom in real estate development 
through much of Maryland but also substantive 
changes in agricultural and land management 
practices, and in the quality and extent of many 
natural habitats. The wanning climate also 
appeared to be having an impact on the distribu¬ 
tion of several species in the state: others were 
simply vanishing for reasons unknown. With 
snapshots of bird distribution just 20 years apart, 
and with data collected at the 'neighborhood 
level.' associating species' distributional changes 
with particular factors becomes more feasible, and 
the minute detail of both Maryland atlas efforts 
certainly lends itself to a more precise under¬ 
standing of bird population dynamics. 
Maryland may be ideally suited to lead this 
second wave of American atlases in the United 
Slates. The state is relatively small but, unlike 
other small states such as West Virginia, and 
Maryland and the District of Columbia have a 
surfeit of birders and field ornithologists; these 
people are devoted both to their state and to its 23 
counties, whose avifaunas they know exquisitely 
well. The Maryland Ornithological Society 
(MOS) learned a great deal from the earlier atlas 
work and, for the second, numerous innovations 
were crucial for planning, execution, and publi¬ 
cation. MOS retained a full-time, professional 
atlas coordinator, Walter G, Ellison, who was al$o 
responsible for the production of the publication 
itself. Ellison worked with both the Atlas 
Committee and a set of county coordinators, 
who vetted data from >1,000 volunteers in the 
field. These volunteers and coordinators w'ere able 
to submit data from their field cards directly into 
an on-line data base, an innovation that surely 
saved many thousands of hours of work, com¬ 
pared to atlas work of the 1980s. 
Maryland's size also permitted volunteers to 
collect data on an even smaller scale than in other 
states, the ‘quarter block,’ measuring 2.5 X 2.5 km 
rather than the standard 5X5 km. This finer scale 
was used in counties experiencing the most drastic 
changes, whether because of development (Balti¬ 
more, Prince George’s, Montgomery. Howard, 
southern Carroll) or possibly because of changing 
climate: mountainous Garrett County, in the far 
western part of the state, and marshy Somerset 
County, the farthest south. 
The Atlas Committee also forged strong ties 
with agencies at the state and federal levels, which 
provided both funding and expertise. The Wildlife 
Heritage Division of the Maryland Department ol 
Natural Resources and the Biological Resources 
Division of the U.S. Geological Survey at 
