Book reviews

‘You’d have to be crook on yourself to write a book like this’, to paraphrase my late father. Often, before works such as this new list of Australian birds by Les Christidis and Walter Boles (hereafter C&B) even appear, new papers make parts of them out of date.Nonetheless,whatever one’s gripes about this book or its shortcomings, C&B is a milestone in the literature of Australian avian systematics. It is an entrée to the everincreasing literature on ever more diverse topics in avian systematics. C&B is the second edition of the authors’ 1994 list of the birds of Australia and its territories (Christidis andBoles 1994). Its first 42 pages cover Aims, Taxonomic Decisions, Species Concepts, Taxonomic Methods, English Names, and include the Main Species List and Supplementary List (vagrants and unsuccessful introductions) with lists of orders, families, genera and species. Here the authors lay out their modus operandi and its results. Arguably, the section on species concepts is the most fundamental part of the book. The book’s heart follows: an excellently structured 214-page compendiumof the now vast systematic literature on birds at all taxonomic levels down to species. Here the reasons for taxonomic decisions are given. Buy the book for these 214 pages alone. CSIRO Publishing’s now familiar shades of blue help one navigate through the text. C&B’s scope spans the classification and sequence of taxonomic categories from subclass down to, but not so much below, the species level, and includes a complete listing of resident and vagrant birds, to species, for Australia and its territories. C&B is complementary to and not necessarily in conflict with the Directory of Australian Passerines (Schodde and Mason 1999) and its forthcoming non-passerine volume, or the Zoological Catalogue of Australian Birds (Schodde and Mason 1997) and the HANZAB series (e.g. Higgins 1999) where the prime taxonomic foci are at and below the species level. Australia is nowunusuallywell servedwith these checkliststyle publications. Perhaps it’s time to consider on-line updates to them (see for example, http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/ SACCBC&Baseline.html). C&Bfollow thenowconventional treatment of dividing living birds (subclass Neornithes) into three groups, each of which includes all species that are understood to have evolved from early nodes or branching points in the avian evolutionary tree. First is the Palaeognathae, which in Australia covers emus and cassowaries. Phylogenetically, the palaeognaths are the sistergroup, i.e. closest living relatives, to all other birds (Neognathae), which in turn comprise the Galloanseres and Neoaves or all species descended from another node. The Galloanseres are the waterfowl, megapodes, true quail and some other elements not native toAustralia (NewWorld quail, pheasants and turkeys). New things start to appear in how C&B treat the remaining neognaths, the Neoaves. With caveats, C&B boldly follow Fain and Houde (2004), who concluded first on the basis of one fragment of nuclear DNA and then, apparently, up to 11 others (Fain and Houde 2006; see also Ericson et al. 2006) that Neoaves comprise two groups, the Metaves and Coronaves. Fain and Houde (2004) saw these as essentially parallel ecological radiations of birds (but see Livesey and Zusi 2007). Australian members of theMetaves would be tropicbirds, grebes, flamingos (extinct), pigeons and doves, nightjars, frogmouths, and swifts and owlet-nightjars. The close relationship of the last two to each other is now well established on molecular and morphological grounds (Mayr 2002; Chubb 2004a; Barrowclough et al. 2006; Ericson et al. 2006). All remaining Australian birds would be members of the Coronaves. Recent literature on morphology and molecules does not unanimously accept the Metaves/Coronaves split (e.g. Chubb 2004b; Livesey and Zusi 2007;Morgan-Richards et al. 2008) but two of themost exhaustiveDNA sequence-based studies of avian phylogeny to date, including one published since C&B appeared, do not reject it (Ericson et al. 2006; Hackett et al. 2008); perhaps C&B breathed a sigh of relief! That seemingly unfamiliar and odd groupings, like swifts with owlet-nightjars, appear in the literature occasionally is because classifications are two-dimensional, linear sequences of names that try to summarise our best understanding, or hypothesis, of what themajor groupsof birds are andhow they are related to each other. If the hypothesis and names never changed, either we would understand everything and have nothing left to falsify, or nobody would be working on it. Though still debated, recent findings suggest that the early history of bird evolution happened with many divergences in a relatively short space of time (e.g. Chubb 2004b; Ericson et al. 2006; Hackett et al. 2008; but see alsoBrown et al. 2007). Twocorollaries of this are thatany kind of data, molecular, morphological or otherwise, will have difficulty teasing apart exact branching patterns at the base of the avian evolutionary tree, and that different kinds of data may not converge on one answer. This impacts howweperceive and name major groups of birds. All ornithologists can share in the fascination of this challenge, especially when watching birds. That an Osprey may bemore closely related to owls than falcons, which in turnmaybemore closely related to parrots,meansweare in exciting times. Moreover, we are on the verge of a major gearchange as the study of entire genomes impacts ornithology (Stapley et al. 2008). A few specific criticisms and comments. C&B should have placed the Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) with fig-parrots and lorikeets: DNA sequences (sources cited by C&B) and osteology (see Mayr 2008 published after C&B) reject the alternative that Budgerigars are allied to the rosellas and their allies. With hindsight, the result has been clear since the study of Christidis et al. (1991), but different datasets and methods of analysiswere necessary to believe the result and to better interpret morphology (e.g. theBudgerigar’swing-stripe is clearly lorikeetlike not rosella-like). Following Sorenson and Payne (2005), C&B place the Pallid Cuckoo in an expanded Cacomantis. They similarly expand the butcherbirds (Cracticus) to include the Australian Magpie (see Storr 1952). Although these actions are phylogenetically and taxonomically valid, is it helpful not