Whose Bird? Men and Women Commemorated in The Common Names of Birds

climate and vegetation. The sections on vegetation and ornithological history are particularly and appropriately detailed. I’d have liked a little more pre-history and note with surprise the lack of reference to the major anthropological work on the region (Tindale 1925, Records of the South Australian Museum 3 , 61–102). A 23-page general discussion of the avifauna provides an overview of habitat preferences, comparison with nearby islands and the mainland, and bird conservation issues. The section on conservation could usefully have included reference to the vulnerability of the seabird breeding colonies that occur on islets offshore, and discussion about whether the isolated population of the Australian Magpie on Groote Eylandt is a distinct subspecies. As an island biogeographic case study, this is inevitably an unreplicated natural ‘experiment’, and Noske and Brennan deal with this by comparison with the moderately extensive data available for other Northern Territory islands. However, few firm conclusions could be drawn, and a sense of frustration becomes evident culminating in something of an overstatement that ‘it is spurious to generalise about the colonising ability or dispersal powers of individual species’. A stronger historic perspective would have been worth invoking and might be useful to explain, e.g. the curiously isolated occurrences of the Mangrove Robin in north-eastern Arnhem Land. On the other hand, the authors might argue that this would be heaping speculation upon speculation. The core of the book is a 115-page annotated list of the 228 bird species that have been reported on the island, of which the authors accept 209 as adequately confirmed. For each species, there is a pithy oneor two-line summary of status, a separate summary of historic (pre-1977), Atlas (1977–1981) and recent records, evidence of breeding, status on the GEMCO mining lease, and regional context. One could hardly ask for a more thorough documentation of the still scant record of the island’s avifauna. The book concludes with a series of appendices providing supplementary information including methodological details of formal surveys conducted by Noske for GEMCO. There are ten pages of colour plates and numerous black and white illustrations. The book is written in unpretentiously clear English and its simple, documentary style is enlivened by numerous black-and-white photos of birds and habitats, and by a number of summary figures and tables. Colour figures include vegetation and fire history maps along with photographs of vegetation types and of a few birds. This is an exceptionally thorough regional avifaunal survey of a most interesting location. It should prove accessible and invaluable to people as diverse as mine managers, students of tropical biology, and of course, visiting ornithologists.