From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2002:

100 Birds & How They Got Their Names
by Diana Wells, illustrated by Lauren Jarrett
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (708 Broadway, New York, NY 10003), 2002.
297 pages, hardcover. $18

The title 100 Birds & How They Got Their Names is somewhat
misleading, because only a small part of each of Diana Wells’
species entries actually concerns how or why the likes of the booby,
goatsucker, and titmouse came to be identified as they are.
At that, some of the entries could be disputed, as Wells
consistently favors descriptive origins over the onamatopoeic, even
when the onamatopoeic explanation is seemingly obvious. Wells
insists, for instance, that the titmouse is named “from the Old
Icelandic titr, meaning ‘small,’ and the Anglo-Saxon mase, ‘small
bird,'” though she concedes that, “The chickadee’s name is
onomatopoeic, from the sound of its call; the Cherokee Indians
called it tsikililt.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Birds of Eastern & Central North America (5th edition)
by Roger Tory Peterson
Houghton Mifflin (222 Berkeley St., Boston, MA 02116), 2002. 427
pages, illus., hardcover. $30.00.

I met Roger Tory Peterson just once, briefly, before a
public hearing at which we both testified against a Connecticut
Department of Environmental Protection plan to kill mute swans.
Peterson was 82, quite ill, and sent someone else to represent
him–but at the last minute he rose out of bed and came to pit his
moral weight against the might of both the hunting and birding
establishments. Native or non-native, Peterson said briefly, the
mute swans were birds, were sentient and intelligent beings,
contributed to human appreciation of all bird-kind, and deserved to
live.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Lives of North American
Birds by Kenn Kaufman
Houghton Mifflin Company (215 Park Avenue South,
N.Y., NY 10003), 2001. 704 pages, paperback. $25.00.

The Lives of North American Birds is not a field guide for
identifying birds, though it is organized much like one. Instead it
provides detailed information about the lives of 680 species
occurring regularly in North America, with “shorter accounts for
more than 230 others that visit occasionally.”

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