The Random House Atlas of Bird Migration
A visual feast, this book offers fine browsing compared with Paul Kerlinger's How Birds Migrate (LJ 8/95), the choice of those who want a good read. Elphick's text is well done, but the strength of this compilation is the profusion of paintings, photos, maps, tables, charts, and sidebars with lengthy but vital captions. Coming from such varied locales as England, Mississippi, Australia, and South Africa, the contributors help create an atlas that is worldwide in scope: coverage includes "Birds on the Move" (a general discourse on migration); big sections on migrants of North America, Eurasia, the far north, the sea, and the Southern Hemisphere; "Almost Migrations"; and a "Catalog of Migrants," an annotated list of an additional 500 migrant species with distances traveled. Good as these new books are, they supplement and partially update rather than replace classics such as Jean Dorst's The Migration of Birds (1962) and G.V.T. Matthews's Bird Navigation (1968. 2d ed.), but it is a pleasure to recommend The Atlas of Bird Migration for academic and larger public libraries.?Henry T. Armistead, formerly with Thomas Jefferson Univ. Lib., PhiladelphiaCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.