Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, Vol. 1

Tibet and Its Birds, by Charles Vaurie. Witherby, £10.50. Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, Vols. 5 and 6, by Salim AM and S. Dillon Ripley. OUP, £8 each. Birds of Guatemala, by Hugh C. Land. Livingston, Wynnewood, Pa, $10.00. Although bird books continue to pour from the presses, there remains one huge blank, where we know almost nothing of the bird life today: China. It is therefore especially valuable to have a book on a small part of that huge and ornithologically almost unknown country, Tibet. Its avifauna is about as different from the only other part of China we know about, Hong Kong, as you would expect from the remoteness of the two. Charles Vaurie, of the American Museum of Natural History, is well known as the author of the standard work on the birds of the Palaearctic. The present volume is on similar lines, only in more detail, that is to say it covers only taxonomy and distribution, and not descriptions. The amount of distributional data given for Tibetan birds is, however, very detailed, and indeed almost exhaustive of what is known in the west. In addition there are a number of excellent introductory essays, which amount to a separate book on the geography of Tibet, the history of its ornithological exploration, and the more usual discussion of bird distribution and migration. All this is especially valuable to have about a part of the world that so few westerners are nowadays able to visit. The detailed gazetteer is particularly praiseworthy, and Arthur Singer's three colour plates illustrate some birds it would be hard to find depicted elsewhere. The great Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan rolls on its majestic way. Shall we again, one wonders, see the like of this stupendous effort by two ornithologists to monograph the avifauna of a subcontinent? The Birds of the Western Palaearctic is assembling in the wings, but powered by a much larger team; the similar effort for North America has wilted after a single volume. The best news I have heard for a long time is that the remaining volumes of the Indian Handbook are now all in MS, and await only the ponderously creaking machine of modern publishing to process them. The first four volumes have already been reviewed in ORYX (Dec. 1969, Sept. 1970, May 1971), and little more need be said but that these further two maintain the same high standard, both in text and illustrations, and that all those concerned with Indian ornithology are increasingly impatient to have the full set on their shelves. These two cover the larks, swallows, shrikes, orioles drongos, wood-swallows, starlings, mynahs, crows and waxwings (vol. 5), and the cuckoo-shrikes, minivets, ioras, bulbuls and babblers (vol. 6). Several of these families, notably the mynahs, minivets, bulbuls and babblers, are particularly characteristic of the Indian avifauna, and accurate and up-to-date information ahout them is correspondingly valuable. Guatemala is one of the more favoured Central American countries so far as ornithology is concerned. The fact that so able an ornithologist as Jorge Ibarra lives and works there has meant a great encouragement for workers coming from abroad. One of these was the late Hugh Land, who provided