The Atlas of Australian Birds by M. Blakers, S.J.J.F. Davies, and P.N. Reilly

When I first heard of an impending Atlas of Australian Birds, my expectations were, it now seems to me, naive, showing certainly no acquaintance with the ‘birds atlas projects [which] have been developed in many other countries’ (actually, the bibliography numbers attached to this direct us to just three such projects: a use of ‘many’ learned, perhaps, from such usages as ‘this wine will improve with cellaring for many years’). I envisioned a work of advanced cartography, in which large-scale maps would pinpoint the known habitats of rare birds, more general maps the range and distribution of more common species; and I feared that such an atlas might facilitate activities of the notorious bird-smugglers (though I later came to the conclusion that they were already as well-informed as to these matters as they could be). Clearly, I did not envisage the difficulty of showing on a map the 365 different species in the area round Brisbane; much less did I guess – though after all, this is common enough – that the use of the word ‘atlas’ had almost nothing to do with the advancement of cartography. It is characteristic of the book we have that its use of the terms ‘Field Atlas’ and ‘Historical Atlas’ have nothing to do with this physical object, but refer in the one case to a concerted gathering of ornithological records from 1976-1981, and in the other the scanning of known ornithological data for three periods, before 1901, 1901–50 and 1950–76. The book is full of maps: but these are very small-scale maps on which the findings of the five-year bird watch are registered diagrammatically, and much smaller maps registering diagrammatically the records of those three past periods. So much to clear up false expectations for readers as boggle-eyed as I was, who have not yet actually seen the book. For those who have, but who have not inspected it carefully, a description of what all those maps actually offer might be of some interest. In the body of the book, each species is given a page with a map, on which are registered sightings, by circles, and indubitable breeding, by discs. These circles and discs come in three sizes – the smallest for less than 11% occurrence on the report sheets submitted by however many of the 3,000 or so contributors (or as the book has it, ‘atlassers’) who studied that block, the medium for 11–40%, the largest for over 40%. Each of these symbols is for an area of 1° latitude by 1° longitude (except in the case of Tasmania, where mapping is in 10' x 10') – that is, as the Atlas kindly informs me, for an area roughly 100 km x 100 km. It is not a book, then, that will help an armchair ornithologist (like myself) to go out and actually see real, live free-flying birds. With its big spots and circles and conglomerations of big spots and circles, it is likely to give such an armchair ornithologist at least an initial impression of the thickness of population of species: but that appearance is specious, for as the Introduction carefully warns, all this is affected by the visibility of birds to eager bird-watchers. No bird-watcher worth his salt, for instance, is likely to visit the area around Healesville without looking for the Powerful Owl so vividly described in David Fleay’s Nightwatchmen of Bush and Plain, and there is nothing surer than that word passes round as to just where territories are centred: that more than 40% of record sheets for what looks like this area (I do not have the six transparent overlays, which can be purchased from the Royal Australian Ornithologists Union, which offer to add some geographical information to these small spotted but otherwise blank maps) witnesses more, almost certainly, to the clubbability of bird-watchers than to anybody else’s chance, even with Fleay’s guidance as to what to look for, of stumbling upon them: ‘Territories are usually well separated with pairs at intervals of 5-20 km’. It would be tedious to spell out the other warnings about possibly misleading impressions which are carefully explained in the Introduction (some birds, for example, flock in some parts of their range, and are hence highly visible, but not in others, where they might be no less common): anybody sufficiently interested to buy the book will find all these considerations very responsibly spelled out: as its provenance suggests, this is a study thoroughly informed by scholarly qualification. One which has its awkwardnesses, however. One of these might be highlighted by looking at an extreme case, the Night Parrot. Here we have four large circles, widely separated, indicating in each case greater than 40% sightings in each area. On the other hand, we have ‘Field Atlas Records: 4’, meaning that from 1976–81 this elusive bird (not necessarily rare) was seen four times. At this point, we turn back to the map in the Introduction which informs us with a different grading of discs of the number of visits to the 812 blocks central to the Atlas. And somewhere about here my comprehension collapses: so far as I can see, there were 6-25 reports for three of the four blocks where the bird is reported, and 1–5 for the other. These figures seem simply not to afford those large circles. It is also the case that the ‘Maximum Reported Rate’, offered in percentage figures with each map, is more often than not – on a spot check – lower than the exuberant attestation of the symbols on the Australia beside it. It should be clear from all this that the Atlas of Australian Birds does not offer up its information at a glance, nor, unequivocally, to fairly sustained critical scrutiny. I must add, dolefully, that it will not usefully replace or supersede any of the already bewildering range of books available to amateurs who simply want to identify birds seen: for each species it does have a drawing in black and white, but these are useless compared with Slater’s elegant diagrams or the paintings or photographs ranging from Leech to Reader’s Digest. A thick book in a plastic cover from which you might safely wipe porridge with a wet cloth, the Atlas is no kind of coffee-table book, no use for identification, no use for the unplugged-in bird-lover as to just where he might see marvels; neither is it a compilation like Slater’s Rare and Vanishing Australian Birds which will spur the greenie’s concern. Anybody much interested in any Australian bird, or family of birds, will better turn to the excellent monographs of people like Firth. This is, on the face of it, a purely scholarly book, concerned simply to register as best it might a five-year bird-watch, and an historical perspective, with every awareness of its limitations and no message at all. For most species it seems (I didn’t keep a count) it says, ‘There are no measures of abundance’; and for most species where there are ‘measures of abundance’ they tend to fall into sheerly parochial observations: my example, chosen at random, is the Australian King-Parrot: ‘At Boola Boola … in eucalypt forest the density … in the gullies was 0.22 birds/ha’. It is surprising then that – so rumour has it – a reprint is already being thought of. This review has not, I think, made it clear that, although my romantic expectations were defeated, although I find – as I have outlined – some of the handling of information unintelligible, and although I realise hardly less vividly than the editors of the Atlas how partial its knowledge is, I do think the book an enormous achievement. For casual readers – that is, people interested in but not making a cult of ornithology – it is the unrivalled source for the latest information on the standing of rare and vanishing species sub-species and races (I have quickly adapted Slater’s 1978 title, because readers who wish to make comparison will find, either to their delight or frustration, that taxonomic confusion doubles their task). Not all the news is bad: and if with prized parrots land use is judged probably more deleterious than notorious illegal trappings, for less glamorous species modern land use seems to have been beneficial. So, the Cape Barren Goose is one of the few species for which the Atlas does offer an overall population estimate, supposing, too, that on the east coast at least this most beautiful bird is more plentiful than ever. Individual cases of comparable interest cannot be covered in the scope of this review, but one bird that caught my attention was the Plains Wanderer, ‘not just an endemic Australian species’, it is ‘the only member of a separate avian family’. It was recorded eighteen times, roughly in the SE quarter of Australia (area descriptions as used in the Atlas would take too long to explain here: let me only remark that the assiduous reader of the Introduction is faced by fourteen maps curiously divided before he reaches the explanation). Apparently driven out by intense agriculture, it seems likely, to have had new lands opened up by marginal agriculture. Lastly, it is worth noticing that one species at least reminds us of the obvious but often forgotten commonplace that species still wax and wane without human regard, let alone spoliation: ‘It has been suggested that a major cause of the decline of the Forty-spotted Pardalote is competition from other Pardalotes’.

Evan Jones

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