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BIRDS OF SOUTH AMERICA-NON-PASSERINES: RHEAS TO WOODPECKERS. By Francisco Erize, Jorge R. Rodriguez Mata, and Maurice Rumboll. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford, United Kingdom. 2006: 384 pages and 158 color plates. ISBN: 0-691-12688-7. $29.95 (paper).-We have waited a long time for the first English language field guide to treat all non-passerine species of birds of South America. It fills a huge and important niche for field ornithology in the most species rich of continents. For the first time, we no longer have to just imagine all South American hummingbirds, hawks, tinamous, puffbirds, etc. in one handy volume. It's hard to overstate the size of this enormous task (the Introduction explains the book had its start in 1970) and how badly it has been needed. The book is billed as an "illustrated checklist," perhaps an attempt to distance itself from the field guides that have tended more towards comprehensive handbooks best left at home. At a compact 127 × 177 mm (5 × 7 in.) and scarcely 25 mm (1 in.) thick, this book is truly a field guide for bird identification and is much more than a checklist (to me "checklist" implies little more than a stapled list of bird species and, even if illustrated, not with such high quality plates and accompanying text).
The book opens with the usual acknowledgments, preface, two introductions (one titled "the birds in this book"), and an essay on conservation, the last of which is placed a bit awkwardly after a list of abbreviations and a map of the continent, and before the usual page showing external anatomy used in describing field marks. Following these is a unique and interesting, but perhaps not so useful chapter introducing each family. Each family receives two to nine paragraphs describing various characteristics including those of behavior, habitat, and breeding, as well as a summary of worldwide distribution and diversity. The latter part of the account for Odontophoridae seems to have been inadvertently deleted mid-sentence. The next 333 pages (87% of the book) comprise the species accounts and plates. The illustrations are opposite the accounts, each of which is also accompanied by a small range map. Finally, there is a concise glossary, a section on further reading, and (thankfully) a...