The Complete Birds of the World.

Abstract

THE COMPLETE BIRDS OF THE WORLD. Norman Arlott and Ber van Perlo, principal illustrators. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. 2021: 656 pages, 301 color plates, featuring 10,711 bird species. ISBN: 978-0-69119392-2. $65.00 (cloth).—First we were amazed by the 16-volume Lynx Handbook of the Birds of the World, completed in 2011. Then astounded by the 2-volume condensed version of that Lynx masterwork entitled Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World, published in 2014 and 2016. Now we have Princeton’s book that illustrates all of the world’s birds in a single volume. I suppose the next logical step is a smartphone app that features all the information and art found in the 16volume Lynx work...wait—Cornell and Lynx have now done that as well! And to think it all started with James Lee Peters and his Harvard-based world checklist, which required the hard labor of Peters, Ernst Mayr, Raymond Paynter, G. William Cottrell, and many family-level taxonomic contributors from the years 1931–1987. It seems the world has speeded up in producing world ornithologies. And when you add that