Tundra Plovers: The Eurasian, Pacific and American Golden Plovers and Grey Plover

Auk, The, Oct 1999 by Connors, Peter G

The following critiques express the opinions of the individual evaluators regarding the strengths, weaknesses, and value of the books they review As such, the appraisals are subjective assessments and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or any official policy of the American Ornithologists' Union.

Tundra Plovers: The Eurasian, Pacific and American Golden Plovers and Grey Plover.-Ingvar Byrkjedal and D. B. A. Thompson. 1998. T. & A. D. Poyser, London. xxxiii 422 pp., 1 color plate, 58 black-and-white plates, 129 figures, 16 tables, 14 appendices. ISBN 0-85661-109-3. Cloth, $39.95.-Tundra Plovers is an ambitious and rewarding comparative treatment of the four species in the genus Pluvialis. Both authors came to their fascination with tundra plovers through boyhood encounters with the Eurasian Golden-Plover (P apricaria), Ingvar Byrkjedal in Norway, and Des Thompson in Scotland. Over the decades since those initial encounters, they have conducted field work at a variety of sites with all four species, most extensively with the Eurasian Golden-Plover. The book combines a wealth of the authors' original observations, data, and analysis from their own field and museum work with a rich review of the literature and published work of other plover biologists. These are presented in a scholarly fashion, but with frequent narratives of the experiences of the authors that convey the attraction, adventure, and satisfaction of studying these birds. Tundra Plovers is authoritatively documented and beautifully illustrated, a combination that recommends it to both the professional ornithologist and the amateur bird enthusiast.

The main text is organized into 14 chapters covering the major topics of taxonomy, plumages, phylogeny, biogeography, breeding distribution and population trends, breeding schedules and social behavior, sex roles and parental behavior, migration, nonbreeding distribution, behavior and ecology, diet, and conservation. Each chapter ends with a brief summary listing the main points of the chapter. An extensive bibliography contains about 1,000 references, including valuable coverage of the Russian literature. Unlike recent North American literature, the authors elected to omit the hyphen from goldenplover, a treatment we also favor.

The structure of the book enhances readability by allowing a continuous narrative seldom interrupted by details that can be kept in the background. Fourteen appendices are used to provide detailed presentations on plumages, phylogeny (a 20-page paper that includes Godtfred A. Halvorsen as first author with Byrkjedal and Thompson), populations, nestsite habitats, vocalizations, and various other features of tundra plovers. The text contains no footnotes, use of Latin names is minimized, and the 16 tables are removed to a position at the end of the book. Scholars wanting to follow points in detail may wish the tables accompanied the text, but we believe the gain in reading comfort outweighs this need. Tables are positioned at the end of the book, after the appendices and references. This seems a surprising choice at first, because the tables are more closely allied to specific portions of the text than are the appendices, but the result is that flipping pages to find a table is made easier by this location.

Tundra Plovers is an extraordinarily attractive book for one so filled with hard ornithological information. The numerous black-and-white photographs of plovers, nests, and tundra habitats help to convey the beauty of these species and the places where they breed. Ingvar Byrkjedal has added numerous penand-ink drawings that show plumages and postures in excellent detail, and each chapter is introduced by another of his drawings, along with a quotation appropriate to the chapter's content. The many range maps (which are based partly on information gathered from 4,400 specimens from numerous museums) show not only the breeding and nonbreeding distributions, but also breeding activities and migration timing by date for the entire range of each species.

A book of this scope and detail is not without faults, of course. As noted, the bulk of the authors' field work is with Eurasian Golden-Plovers; their work with American Golden-Plovers (P dominica) and Pacific Golden-Plovers (P fulva) is limited to single-season, single-site studies for each species by Byrkjedal. Because Tundra Plovers emphasizes the resuits of that original work, it sometimes fails to convey the full range of what is known about these species from other regions. Several sections dealing with American and Pacific golden-plovers do not incorporate information from the Birds of North America account of these species (0. W. Johnson and P. G. Connors 1996). Examples include no mention of a distinctive flight chase call given by the American Golden-Plover during display and territorial defense on the breeding grounds; a generalization that both American and Pacific golden-plovers breed in vegetation 1.5 cm tall, ignoring information from western Alaska where Pacific Golden-Plovers usually nest in much taller vegetation; and a statement that American and Pacific golden-plovers behave similarly and conspicuously when disturbed at the nest, overlooking the fact that Pacific Golden-Plovers nesting in western Alaska often are much warier than American Golden-Plovers. Other omissions include a description of "the only long-distance ringing recovery" of a Pacific Golden-Plover that ignores three other records, a discussion of juvenal plumages that fails to mention the distinctive juvenal rectrices of Pacific Golden-Plovers, and range maps of American and Pacific golden-plovers that do not show recently discovered breeding grounds in southwestern Alaska.