Customer Reviews

Birds of the World: Recommended English Names

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A typical page in this book contains 3 columns: International English Name, Scientific Name, and Region(s), with one line per species. Birds are grouped by order and family.

One of the best things about this book is that it comes with a CD with an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the birds in the book. My "life list" currently consists of little notes written in a bunch of field guides (all written in various languages, depending on where in the world I was). I plan to use this spreadsheet to consolidate and organize all of the data I've collected so far about the birds I have seen around the world, and I find it helpful to have consistent English names for the birds (rather than the local names in the field guides).

This book is fantastic. It gives the International Ornithological Congress recommended English names of the 10,066 species following the taxonomic sequence of Monroe and Sibley. Hopefully at long last a standard has been set and we will all use the same names as this book encourages. Included with the book is an extremely useful CD containing all of the books information as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This will no doubt help all computer software creators in updating their lists automatically. No doubt some people will refuse to adopt the new names but in the long run this will proove to be the standard and they will be the poor loosers.An invaluable book (and CD) buy it.

Do we really need to have standardised English names? We have latin names to prevent the confusion that local english names may cause. For example how can you say which is better Common Loon or Great Northern Diver. It's pointless