The Bird Conservation Alliance (BCA) is a network of organizations working together to conserve wild birds.
Through the Alliance, millions of birdwatchers and concerned citizens are united with conservation professionals, scientists, and educators to benefit bird conservation efforts.
Learn more about the Bird Conservation Alliance - many resources are available at their expanded site.
A conference is being planned for 2012 to address the many challenges of global change.The 2012 international Planet Under Pressure conference will provide a comprehensive update of the pressure planet Earth is now under. The conference will discuss solutions at all scales to move societies on to a sustainable pathway. It will provide scientific leadership towards the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development - Rio+20.
I've been working on updating the Birds of Wisconsin checklist for the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology website for almost a year - the old one was outdated. Jesse Peterson (WSO's former president and current Membership Chair) has recently helped me with it, and it is now ready. Thanks to Jesse for his assistance with this process. Thanks also for suggestions and additional ideas to Bettie Harriman, Tom Schultz, and Jeff Baughman.
See the new checklist at: http://wsobirds.org/wischecklist.pdf
This checklist incorporates the most recent updates in nomenclature and sequence - it follows the most recent changes mandated by the American Ornithologists' Union's North American Classification Committee (NACC) for their Check-List of North American Birds. There are many changes to scientific names, many changes to the sequencing of species within the list, and one
family has been completely eliminated from the WI list. Thraupidae, which used to be the family containing the North American representatives of the tanagers, is gone from our WI list. The 3 species we see in WI (two are rare) are now classified in the Cardinalidae. The Thraupidae still exists, of course, but only those tanager species breeding in the tropics are included in that family now.
The position of the longspurs and Snow Bunting in the list has been moved (now placed in their own family, the Calcariidae), the genus name for the waterthrushes is different, as is the scientific name for Winter Wren (now split from the newly-named Pacific Wren of the west coast and Pacific Northwest), and many other changes will be noticeable as you look through the
list. Note the new common name for Whip-poor-will - it is now Eastern Whip-poor-will. This separates it from the recently-split Mexican Whip-poor-will.
Bill Mueller
Conservation Chair, Wisconsin Society for Ornithology
, it's the truth contained herein that is so powerful and provocative. This book is a series of essays on economics, entitled What Matters? - Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, by Wendell Berry, (with a forward by Herman Daly), published by Counterpoint Press. If you already know the work of Wendell Berry, the clear-eyed wisdom found here probably won't surprise you after all. And if you've never read anything by Wendell Berry, this is as good a place to begin as any. I heartily recommend it: Economics for people who never studied economics, and for those who did.
- in fact, the publishers (Princeton University Press) call Birds of the West Indies, by Norman Arlott, an "illustrated checklist". It's smaller than most field guides by half - only 240 pages. But that small size packs a lot of information, on 550 species from the West Indies region. Each matching text page with its facing page of gorgeous plates displays from six to ten species. You'll find that the West Indies are rich in nightjar species, hummingbirds, and cuckoos. Some species are very familiar to the North American birder, because of course there are many of "our" breeding species that winter in the West Indies, and they are all illustrated and described here, in addition to the many endemics found in this region. The last 70 pages are all maps, somewhat simplified, showing the range of the species highlighted on the overall map of the region. I always like guides with maps arranged nearer the plates and descriptions, but it's rather easy to see why this method of organization was chosen, due to the small size of the book and the limitations that creates. A fine book for any birder traveling to the islands - and I wish I was headed there right now. I'd be taking this book with me.
Since many new field guides are published each year, it's not easy for one to rise above the pack. But this book - Birds of the Middle East, Second Edition - by Richard Porter and Simon Aspinall (Princeton University Press) is the obvious choice for "first place" for me.
