This is a big book; larger than A4 and of just over 800 pages. It is full of information about movements of North American birds in maps (lots of maps), tables and words. round 600 species are covered and their migratory behaviour is described by the results of a century of bird banding (aka ringing in this part of the world), MOTUS studies and transmitters (as well as intrinsic ‘markers’ such as genotype, parasites etc). The results cannot fail to astound you in terms of the complexity and simplicity of avian travels.
As a past visitor to the USA in spring, I couldn’t resist looking at the list of warblers I’d seen in Rock Creek Park, Washington DC; Central Park, New York; Magee Marsh, Ohio; upper New York state; and the Jack Pines of Michigan; and then look them up and to see how far they’d come and how far they had to go when I was getting neck-ache searching for them in the treetops. The variety of destinations in breeding and non-breeding seasons was very broad – not at all surprising but very interesting.
The authors are very keen on the concept of migratory coherence. Imagine the breeding and non-breeding ranges of a species, Let us imagine individuals at the western and eastern ends of the breeding range – do the western birds trnd to go to the western end of the non-breeding range and the eastern birds stick to the eastern end , or do they swap, or do they mix perfectly? The answers illuminate migratory coherence and the argument is made well that this is a potentially important contributor to conservation risk. But also, for me, the emerging picture is simply riveting.
There is a short ‘interesting note’ attached to some species and one tells me that a female Burrowing Owl nested in Kansas and Saskatchewan, 1800+km, in the same breeding season – you can’t spot that with binoculars!
All of the internal artwork is by John Anderton and his work both adorns and informs the texts.
The cover? It’s birdy. I’d give it 7/10.
The Atlas of North America’s Migratory Birds: tracking movement across seasons and continents by P.P. Mara and A. Scarpignato is published by Princeton University Press.
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