Guide to the Identification and Ageing of Holarctic Waders

home  →  vogeltrekstation  →  info voor ringers  →  determinatie  →  literatuur  →  prater

A.J. Prater & J.H. Marchant & J. Vuorinen 1977. Guide to the Identification and Ageing of Holarctic Waders. BTO, Tring. 168 pp. ISBN -.

Peter Grant in British Birds 1978, 71(9):420: In covering all the waders of Eurasia (excluding India and southeast Asia), North America and North Africa - 117 species or 58% of the world total - the need for the first detailed guide to waders has been fulfilled with laudable overkill. Species breeding in the Holarctic are treated in detail - with emphasis on the most numerous ones - under headings of identification, ageing, sexing, geographical variation and biometrics. For irregular breeders and vagrants, only the basic identification criteria are given. Thumbnail line drawings are scattered through the text to illustrate points of detail, and a clever coded system indicates the breeding and winter range of each species. Robert Gillmor's beautiful cover design of Ringed Plovers is a masterpiece. Primarily designed for ringers, this guide will automatically have a place in the ringing bag whenever waders are the quarry. Much of the content stems from sexing and ageing research by wader-ringing groups; it is good to see their published data summarised under one cover. But this book is much more than a guide for ringers. Numerous field guides have in recent years greatly widened the base of field identification skill. The tip of the pyramid is proportionately that much higher, too. Birdwatchers may look back smugly now as they routinely identify species which, only 20 or even ten years ago, were beset with puzzles. Further advances, however, will not be fuelled by the necessarily abridged generalities of the modern field guides. The serious bird identifier will now no longer be content to determine the species of waders, but will seek to discover its age, sex and subspecies. This book points the way forward and answers the questions so often asked about the apparently complex array of waders plumages. The gallery of black-and-white photographs by J.B. & S. Bottomley is typically superb. The mind boggles at the industry of the authors in completing such a comprehensive, standard work on waders in the hand. I urge them, however, to consider producing a version specifically for field use, perhaps dealing with a smaller geographical area (the west Palerctic?), without the biometric data, but with many more photographs and illustrations. The demand for such a book would surely be enormous.

Deze pagina is voor het laatst bijgewerkt op 24 oktober 2006.