Birds of the Palearctic: Non-Passerines

While the identification of Western Palearctic birds has been extensively covered in field guides and handbooks in recent years, those species restricted to the eastern part of the region are far less well known. Norman Arlott’s two-part treatment of the birds of the entire Palearctic aims to address that imbalance, and this volume on the non-passerines completes the author-artist’s major project.

First impressions are of an attractively illustrated and compact book which follows the recently redesigned format for Collins field guides. However, delve a little deeper and it quickly becomes apparent that the potential for both illustrations and text is undoubtedly limited by space and, to some extent, content.

Each species has a short paragraph outlining ‘field notes’, song/call and habitat, but the lack of detail, frequent repetition and occasional error often render this of little or no use. To take one of many examples, anyone wanting to find out how to separate the rather similar Least, Little, Yellow and Schrenk’s Bitterns will have to look further than the field notes, which for all four species consist of the same single word: “skulking”.

Similarly, Semipalmated and Western Sandpipers and Red-necked and Little Stints are all said to be “Difficult to separate from other stints, especially in non-breeding plumage, note bill shape and calls”, which, though not untrue, doesn’t need repeating four times in as many paragraphs, and is barely the start of it. No reference is made to mantle colour (let alone legs) being the easiest ways to separate Red-legged Kittiwake from Black-legged Kittiwake, though the greyer underwing of the former is mentioned but not shown in the illustration. The texts for nine of the 10 nightjar species all begin with the unsurprising comment “nocturnal” (the 10th, Vaurie’s Nightjar, instead being “Very little-known”).

Among a multitude of other questionable statements, the hundreds-strong Crested Ibis is listed as “Endangered (Extinct?)”, while no mention of this possibility is made for Slender-billed Curlew, unseen in the wild for 10 years now. Errors in scientific names include the comically awful Caprimulgus ignoramus instead of Caprimulgus inornatus for Plain Nightjar – did someone run the text through a spellchecker and simpy click ‘Accept all changes’?

The plates, though attractive overall, are a little over-saturated in places and also fall short on usefulness in a field guide. Raptors and skuas both have figures perched and in flight, and swifts are shown in flight only, but there are no flying wildfowl, waders, gulls or terns. In fact gulls, that most variable group of birds, are particularly poorly treated, with no immature plumages whatsoever and described differences in wing-tip patterns often wrong, as well as no figures of Caspian, Heuglin’s, Steppe or Mongolian Gulls. Instead, vital space has been bizarrely taken up with illustrations of vagrants such as Laughing, Franklin’s, California, Thayer’s and Ring-billed Gulls.

Other accidental species are also depicted, but in a book so short on space and detail, does the observer travelling in the Palearctic really need to know what Cape Petrel, Northern Flicker or Rufous Hummingbird (among many others) look like? And why do two figures for the virtually extralimital Ostrich need a whole plate, opposite five lines of text on an otherwise blank page, at the expense of figures and descriptions of other species?

Contained in an inconvenient separate section at the back, the distribution maps utilise a globe-style projection of the entire Palearctic, no matter how small the range of the species in question, and more space could well have been saved here too in order to allow for improved content elsewhere.

All of that said, this book does have its merits. Some of the plates – Arlott’s more expected role – are well executed and useful for the field. It is also pleasing to see some species featured here which are not well covered in other field guides, and more could perhaps have been made of this potentially unique selling point had its release not coincided with Helm’s Birds of East Asia.

Despite many criticisms, this book and its predecessor volume on passerines will have their uses, for parts of Central Asia in particular. Ultimately, however, much of the content is covered more thoroughly elsewhere.

Tech spec

• Birds of the Palearctic: Non-Passerines by Norman Arlott (Collins, London, 2009).
• 240 pages, 80 colour plates and 631 distribution maps.
• ISBN 9780007155651. Hbk, £25.
• Available from the Birdwatch Bookshop.