Since the first volume appeared in 1992, the series has received various international awards. The first volume was selected as Bird Book of the Year by the magazines Birdwatch and British Birds, and the fifth volume was recognised as Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, the American Library Association magazine. The seventh volume, as well as being named Bird Book of the Year by Birdwatch and British Birds, also received the distinction of Best Bird Reference Book in the 2002 WorldTwitch Book Awards [1] This same distinction was also awarded to Volume 8 a year later in 2003. [2]

Stevenson, T. & Fanshawe, J. Birds of East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi. 2nd Edition (2020). Helm Field Guides, Christopher Helm, London. Bloomsbury.All species known to have become extinct since the year 1500 presented separately in their own appendix. This volume was published in 2003. It has an introductory essay "A Brief History of Classifying Birds" by Murray Bruce. Groups covered in this volume are as follows: Wow. All the Birds of the World in one book. How impossible this seemed when I first became a committed bird watcher as an early teen in the 1980s. Around this time, my parents gave me a copy of the fabulous ‘Birds of the World’ by Oliver L. Austin and Arthur Singer, an early introduction to the wonderful global diversity of birds. This really was more of a guide to the bird families of the world. A more recent and a superb version of this genre of book was also published by Lynx Edicions in 2015, ‘Bird Families of the World: An invitation to the Spectacular Diversity of Birds’ by David W. Winkler, Shawn M. Billerman and Irby J. Lovette. In 1986, when ‘Shorebirds: An Identification Guide to the Waders of the World’ by Peter Hayman, John Marchant and Tony Prater was published by Helm, for birders it seemed like an earth shattering moment. Over the subsequent three decades many wonderful family monographs have been published by a tiny handful of the world’s leading ornithological publishers. However, a single book which has all the bird species in the world was still nothing more than a daydream for birders. During the period from 1992 to 2013, the 17 volume Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) was published by Lynx Edicions. After a 21 year publishing marathon, a single publisher had published illustrations and descriptive text of all the birds in the world. HBW was a publishing milestone and a zoological milestone. Lynx Edicions is an unusual publisher. At the core, driving their efforts is a team of people who are field naturalists and scientists with a deep interest in taxonomy. But they have also channelled their work into a very efficient, commercially savvy and brilliantly administrated publishing business. One outcome of this is a database approach to mining the text and illustrations from one project, adding suitable updates and redeploying for future projects. Davison, G.W.H., Collar, N.J., Boesman, P. & Puan, C.L. 2020. Species rank for Rheinardia ocellata nigrescens (Phasianidae). Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl. 2020 140: 182-194. As a complement to the Handbook of the Birds of the World and with the ultimate goal of disseminating knowledge about the world's avifauna, in 2002 Lynx Edicions started the Internet Bird Collection (IBC). It is a free-access, but not free-licensed, on-line audiovisual library [3] of the world's birds with the aim of posting videos, photos and sound recordings showing a variety of biological aspects (e.g. subspecies, plumages, feeding, breeding, etc.) for every species. It is a non-profit endeavour fuelled by material from more than one hundred contributors from around the world.

data became available, and one country and one state at the time, our data from bird guides were replaced by data from country and state committees for As explained above, the My Birding feature does not exist in Birds of the World, per se, but My Birding data was incorporated into eBird, a global citizen science project that transforms the passion for birding into critical data for research, conservation, and education.

My Birding vs. eBird platforms

Alongside the pictures of the birds are a staggering 11,558 coloured maps, indicating resident, breeding, and non-breeding ranges for all the species included, whilst country codes are added when this helps interpreting the map. Where relevant, succinct notes on range are included as text. However, the maps do not delineate the range of any subspecies or subspecies groups. It is sometimes very difficult to see small patches of colour on the maps, and in some cases a magnifying glass is necessary to see detail, but for the purpose of this book they are entirely adequate. Unfortunately, though, they are not always particularly accurate. For example, Philippine Shortwing occurs in at least two tiny areas of Mindanao not shown on the map. A separate section of the book provides illustrations and maps of 162 species that are thought to have become extinct since 1500. Only 108 of these could be illustrated since some of the species have insufficient information to formulate a picture of their appearance in life, some being known only from fossils. I find it a bit odd that whilst all of the birds known to have gone extinct since 1500 are included, undescribed extant species, which do not yet have a scientific name assigned, are not included in the book. The reason given for this is that while many of these forms will eventually be described and accepted, others are later requalified as subspecies. Whilst I understand this reasoning, it is also very likely that some of the named species in the book will also be downgraded to subspecies, and I think it would have been very useful to have drawn attention to undescribed taxa as a means to alert birders to their existence and to perhaps prompt taxonomists to take more interest in describing them. For example, neither Kilombero Cisticola nor White-tailed Cisticola, sympatric species occurring in a small area of swampland in Tanzania, are included. Yet both are well-known, and indeed have full species accounts in both editions of Birds of East Africa (Stevenson and Fanshawe 2002, 2020). Another example is an undescribed parrotfinch from Timor, Indonesia, for which a good photograph of the distinctive male exists, and indeed this taxon was included with a full species account in Lynx’s own Indonesian field guide (Eaton et al. 2016), along with some other recently-discovered but undescribed taxa. Puan, C.L, Davison, G. & Kim Chye Lim, K. C. 2020. Birds of Malaysia. Lynx and BirdLife International Field Guides Collection. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

This volume was published in 2004. It has an introductory essay "Ornithological Nomenclature" by Richard Banks. Groups covered in this volume are as follows: This volume was published in 2001. It has an introductory essay "Avian Bioacoustics" by Luis Baptista and Don Kroodsma. Groups covered in this volume are as follows: This volume was published in 2002. It has an introductory essay "Extinct Birds" by Errol Fuller. Groups covered in this volume are as follows: This volume was published in October 2007. It includes an introduction to the fossil birds by Kevin J. Kayleigh. This volume covers the following groups:Yes, this book is all about the illustrations, and they vary from acceptable to masterful. In the acceptable spectrum, it´s mainly some issues with proportions and sometimes a bit dull colours. The Pink robin can serve as an example for both. Some ot the waders and birds of prey could also get better in a future update, perhaps.. The vast majority of the illustrations are very good though, and many of them is just perfect! Expertly curated media galleries showing the bird throughout its life cycle (photos, videos, and sound recordings from the Macaulay Library) The two platforms provide some of the same services to birders, but not all the features of one can be found in the other. My Birding users will notice a difference between the two, with eBird offering more tools in certain areas and My Birding in others. The Cornell Lab is committed to improving eBird, and while some of the My Birding features are currently not available in eBird we hope to develop new features in the future. As always development at scale takes time, so we ask for your patience. Etymology of scientific bird names from James A. Jobling’s book, “Dictionary of scientific bird names” – released 2020 Members of our team serve on the international taxonomic authority and our entire platform was built to accept annual taxonomic updates.

For those of us who can remember that the global bird list stood at around 9,500 species not that long ago, it is staggering to see that there are 11,524 “species” illustrated in this impressive book. I use quotation marks because the actual number of species accepted by the various lists, at the time of publication, varied from 10,033 in Howard and Moore (as of August 2018), 10,563 in eBird/Clements (August 2019), 10,783 in IOC (January 2020), to 10,989 in HBW-BirdLife (Dec 2019). The second is the QR code for each species. This links via a smart phone app to the online resources of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and it gives you access to all sorts of detailed information including photos, calls and video recordings. This links the book with the increasingly digital world many people live in. This volume was published in October 2010. It includes a foreword on bird conservation by Stuart Butchart, Nigel Collar, Alison Stattersfield, and Leon Bennun. Groups covered in this volume are as follows:The more I looked at this book the more I liked it. I am going to use it to keep my world list and will use the QR codes to get more detailed info on any species I am interested in. For those who cannot afford or do not want all the previous volumes this might indeed open up access to the fascinating world of bird species. per year. The vast majority of areas get no more than a few hundreds per year! With so few benefits to the countries concerned, Birds of the World is a powerful ornithological research platform that brings together deep, scholarly content from several celebrated works of ornithology with millions of bird observations from eBird and multimedia from the Macaulay Library into a single platform where biologists and birders can explore comprehensive life history information on birds. For the first time ever, you can contemplate All the Birds of the World together in a single easy-to-use, fully illustrated volume. Created for a broad public, from novice birders to expert ornithologists and anyone interested in the spectacular diversity of birds, this book has something for everyone.