Subject: Sibley BL&B discussion (fwd)
Date: Jan 24 10:44:07 2002
From: ian paulsen - ipaulsen at krl.org


HI ALL:
Chris et al. asked me to forward this to everyone on these listservers.

Ian Paulsen
Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
ipaulsen at krl.org
A.K.A.: "Birdbooker"
"Rallidae all the way"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 13:27:03 -0500
From: Chris Elphick <elphick at uconnvm.uconn.edu>
To: ian paulsen <ipaulsen at krl.org>
Cc: david at sibleyart.com, bdunning at fnr.purdue.edu, PATFNYC at aol.com,
george at uconnvm.uconn.edu
Subject: Sibley BL&B discussion

Hi Ian,

Here's a rather lengthy answer to your nice succinct question! We wrote it
for the entire Birdchat audience and would appreciate it if you would post
it for us (none of us subscribe so we are unable to post ourselves). Many
thanks. Chris

MESSAGE FOLLOWS:

Hi everyone,

The recent discussion about the Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior
(SBL&B) has raised a couple of issues that we have been asked about
repeatedly since the book came out, so we thought we'd take this
opportunity to give our perspective.

First, in answer to Ian Paulsen's original question, the book was not
intended to be a textbook of any kind (nor, really, a book for academics or
researchers). Instead, we meant it to be a book for a broad audience of
birders and laypeople who are interested in birds, and our decisions about
the content and organization of the book were made with this readership in
mind. Yet quite a few people have asked us whether the book would make a
suitable ornithology textbook. Our answer is that this will largely depend
on the goals of the course. We do not feel that it is a suitable book for
an upper-division college course, for two main reasons. First, most people
that teach upper-division ornithology organize lectures around a variety of
conceptual issues (e.g., physiology, mating systems, vocal communication).
Although all of these topics are covered in our book, the information is
broadly scattered across multiple chapters, each focused on a different
bird family. This organization would make it very difficult to connect
lectures to the text. Second, our book provides only a very general
overview of ornithology and does not delve as deeply into many topics as
most instructors would want for a course aimed at, for example, biology
majors.

For an advanced (i.e., upper division) course in ornithology we would
strongly recommend Frank Gill's text instead (in fact, this is the book
used by the two of us that teach such a class); more details on Gill's book
are given in the introduction (p. 9) to our book.

That said, our book might be useful for courses aimed at non-majors,
non-credit birding classes, etc. Such courses are likely to be populated by
people inherently interested in expanding their knowledge of birds
primarily for their own enjoyment, rather than students hoping to get a
solid grounding in the biological sciences. In other words, this type of
class is more likely to be taken by our intended audience. A birding class
also is more likely to be organized as a survey of different bird groups,
matching the organization of SBL&B. If you teach, or take, such a course
using this book we would love to hear whether it was a good choice.

The second issue that has come up is our decision not to follow the
conventions of the scientific literature and to provide references within
the text of the book. Several academics have told us that they regret this
decision. In the introduction to the book we explain our reasons for not
including references: basically it allowed us to increase the amount of
text and illustrations by at least 10-15% and, in our opinion, made the
book much more readable. In the introduction we list the major references
that were used to compile the book and provide readers with suggestions for
delving further into the primary literature (Gill is especially good for
general ornithology; the Birds of North America accounts for information on
individual species). If you are interested, the section of the book where
we discuss this topic can be viewed on the web (if you have trouble with
the link, just go to amazon.com, search for Sibley Guide to Bird Life and
Behavior, click on the "Excerpt", then find excerpt pages 4-5 (book pages
9-10)). The full link is:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0679451234/reader
/4/104-4264068-1519942#reader-link

Instead of complete referencing we took the tack of many other books of the
same ilk (e.g., Birder's Handbook, Handbook of the Birds of the World,
Lives of North American Birds) and simply asked authors to compile a
"further reading" list for each chapter. To save space in the book itself
(and reduce its cost), we decided to post these lists on the web. They can
be found at: www.sibleyart.com. This site also has a list of errata.

Hopefully, this message will be useful to anyone who is contemplating
buying or teaching from the book. If you have bought the book, we hope that
you find it useful. If you have further comments please let us know (we can
be contacted through the web site).

Good Birding.

Chris Elphick
Barny Dunning
David Sibley



************************************
Chris Elphick
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of Connecticut
75 North Eagleville Road, U-43
Storrs
CT 06269

elphick at uconnvm.uconn.edu
(860) 486-4547 (Tel)
(860) 486-6364 (Fax)
http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/
http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/faculty/Elphick/
************************************