HBW and Birdlife International Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World, Volume 2: Passerines

This is the passerine volume of the new checklist produced by the team from Handbook of the Birds of the World.  It essentially follows exactly the same format and rules of the first volume and is a hugely impressive work.

There is a very short introduction essentially just updating and responding to criticisms of their original methods.  For this volume they have retained these methods for their taxonomic decisions and so the whole 2-volume set is consistent.  The result is an increase of about 5% in the number of species from the original HBW volumes and they now consider there are 6,592 species of passerine although they accept that some of the decisions do require further work and clarification.  Compared to other checklists the total is similar to the International Ornithological Congress list (www.worldbirdnames.org) but differs quite a bit in the detail of what is split and what is lumped. (The other two main world lists, Clements and Howard & Moore, both consider fewer as species – for African species for example ca 3% fewer in Clements and nearly 6% in Howard & Moore.)

The great thing about this list compared to the others is that every species is both illustrated and has a distribution map.  Both of these have been carefully updated as necessary from the original HBW volumes and there are nearly 650 completely new illustrations as well as revisions of about 10% of the others.  The authors also justify and summarise their taxonomic decisions.  The book is completed with 2,740 references and 67 pages of a comprehensive index.

The price is quite high but if you want a world checklist and an impressive book which contains an enormous amount of information then it is probably worth it.

Book reviewed by Peter Lack

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