Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide

  • Pamela C. Rasmussen &
  • John C. Anderton
Smithsonian Institution/Lynx Edicions: 2005. Two volumes, 384 and 688 pp. £55 8487334679 | ISBN: 8-487-33467-9
Bird identification on a plate: magpies, jays and treepies, as illustrated in Birds of South Asia. Credit: J. C. ANDERTON

S. Dillon Ripley is a titan of twentieth-century Indian ornithology, having written three major works: Synopsis of the Birds of India and Pakistan (Bombay Natural History Society, 1961), the ten-volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 1968–98), and A Pictorial Guide to Birds of the Indian Subcontinent (Oxford University Press, 1983), the last two in collaboration with Indian ornithologist Salim Ali. As secretary emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, Ripley initiated a new bird guide for the Indian subcontinent, intended as his final major work on the region. To his credit, he engaged Pamela Rasmussen and John Anderton to work on the task. Ripley was taken ill shortly afterwards and died in 2001. But the project lived on and the long-awaited result has now been published.

The two-volume Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide covers the avifauna of the entire Indian subcontinent and includes 1,441 species. It expands on similar work by including Afghanistan and the Chagos Archipelago. Volume 1: Field Guide is portable and comprises 180 colour plates by John Anderton and other renowned bird illustrators, with brief adjacent text on field identification and distribution maps. The plates are generally good to excellent, with comprehensive coverage of plumage, although the illustrations of a few birds, such as the common nightingale, have suffered from an over-reliance on museum specimens rather than observations in the field. Several recently described species have been illustrated in a field guide for the first time here. Volume 2: Attributes and Status is a dense, comprehensive work that contains masses of new information on bird identification, variation, occurrence, habits, vocalizations and taxonomy.

The book's greatest value is that Rasmussen has taken nothing for granted, even information published in Ripley's own works. Everything from bird distributions, measurements, vocalizations and identification features has been reviewed from scratch. The species list for the region has also been completely revised. Quite a few species are conservatively listed as ‘hypothetical’, with many previously published and significant records being regarded as ‘insufficiently proven’ (to the disappointment, no doubt, of many a living birdwatcher). Two well respected ornithologists from the first half of the twentieth century, E. C. Stuart Baker and Richard Meinertzhagen, are taken to task for their carelessness or fraudulent work (see Nature 437, 302–303; 200510.1038/437302a). Their records — which underpinned Ripley's previous books on the subcontinent — are either treated with caution or dismissed.

Most significantly, and bravely, Rasmussen has given full species status to many forms for the first time in any modern guide. The common blackbird, for example, is treated as three species, with the Himalayan and south Indian forms elevated to full species. On this she is almost certainly correct, although readers will have to wait for further justification in the scientific literature before her judgements can be fully assessed.