Dear Tweeters,

The bird book authors are already departing from the
taxonomic order that most of us learned.

One example is the field guide to the birds of India
by Grimmett and Inskipp (sorry for botching the title
and the spelling of the authors' names). That book has
woodpeckers way up near the beginning. If I am not
mistaken, raptors were moved forward, to be near
seabirds. This is to reflect the Sibley-Monroe
taxonomy.

I found myself taking an eternity to find the
families of birds when I used that book in the field.
At times, I did what I almost never do at home--I
resorted to the alphabetical index, since my ingrained
woodpeckers-are-always-in-the-middle-of-the-book
method would not work.

After a few days, I started getting used to it. Then,
to my horror, I could not find the families in my
other field guides when I got home!



=====

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com


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