Customer Reviews

Whose Bird?: Common Bird Names and the People They Commemorate

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If your a birdwatcher, natural science historian, or just someone who's wondered about those whose names are immortalized in the common names of birds, WHOSE BIRD? will provide a lot of answers. The authors provide brief biographies of 1124 people associated with bird names. Many of those names are no longer current (e.g., Grinnell's Chickadee is now known as Mountain Chickadee), but it's still interesting to learn something of Grinnell and see a list of the birds baring his name.
Biographies range from a single sentence to more than a page, with most approximately a paragraph long. In addition are sidebars scattered throughout the book on such subjects as Nationalities (how many birds are named for citizens of Denmark/England/India etc.); Shot (a discussion of the number of ornithologists/collectors who met their demise as a result of gunshot wounds); and Aristocrats (which birds were named for the aristocracy, and why).
Black and white reproductions of photos and paintings depicting those described pepper the text. It's obvious that the publisher's goal was to limit the number of pages, with the unfortunate result of small type, overly long line lengths, and thin margins. Book design is usually easy to ignore, but the poor design exhibited here seriously detracts from an otherwise interesting and valuable reference. That complaint aside, I would not hesitate to recommend this work to anyone with an interest in birds or the history of natural science.

Beo Beolens and Michael Watkins' Whose Bird? surveys common bird names and the people they commemorate, providing in effect a mini-biography of every person after whom a bird has been named in English. Add over a hundred illustrations to an encyclopedia with entries by bird and individual and you have a scientific reference which is also easily accessed by lay readers.