Current Ornithology by Val Nolan Jr., Ellen D. Ketterson, Charles F. Thompson
Current Ornithology.-Val Nolan Jr., Ellen D. Ketterson, and Charles F. Thompson, eds. 1997. Vol. 14. xi + 303 pp. Plenum Publishing, New York. ISBN 0-306-45739-3. $89.50 (cloth).
The editors state in the Introduction that chapters in Current Ornithology should fall into 3 general categories: overwhelming topics that need to be organized and put into perspective, newly emerging fields, or topics with a broad-range interest to biologists in several disciplines. This volume, the second edited by Nolan and Ketterson, however presents an eclectic collection of topics which are hard to pigeon-hole into those three groups. Topics include birds and chemical irritants, temporal flexibility in avian reproduction, sexual selection and song repertoires, social dominance, nonbreeding season energy management, and motor correlates of vocal diversity. They all deal specifically with birds, none would appear to be that overwhelming, and most are not about newly emerging fields. Rather, I would characterize them as up-to-date reviews on topics within main-stream ornithology. Nothing wrong with that, although I find it hard to believe that the Brown Thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) has a vocal repertoire size nearly 10 times that of any other species in the world, as suggested by the appendix of the sexual selection chapter.
