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A PERSONAL PROJECT TO SEE ALL THE BIRD FAMILIES ON EARTH |
and to photograph as many as reasonably possible |
I've been fascinated by bird diversity — as represented by bird families — since I was given a book on bird families (Austin 1961) as a child. My father loved travel so I got to circle the globe when young. I joined Van Remsen and other Bay Area birders in my first world birding trip (to Colombia) in 1975 but did not really focus on seeing a member of each bird family until the 1980s. I started web pages on Bird Families of the World in 1999 and kept track of newly proposed families or those lumped through new genetic research. Using Clements' list as my standard, I thought that I had completed my personal set of all the bird families on Christmas Day 2006, with Oilbird in Trinidad.
That did not last long. Within a couple of years Egyptian Plover, Hylocitrea, and Rail-babbler were added to global family lists, with more to come. I've continued to travel for new families, including 3 in Papua New Guinea (2017) plus more in Cuba & Domincan Republic, Spot-throat in Tanzania (2018), Elachura in Bhutan (2019), and then, finally, Magellanic Plover in Argentina (Nov 2022). I've now completed the current set of all the bird families in the World. That includes every extant family on the Clements, IOC, Birdlife, and my own Creagrus world family list. A 40-year quest is now complete . . . barring future unexpected taxonomic revisions! |
By the turn of the 21st century, I'd also become interested in photographing every bird family but was hampered by the difficulty of taking slides in dark jungles. I got a decent digital camera in 2005, now 19 years ago. That helped a lot but by then it was not possible or practical to redo decades of birding trips. In the following pages, there are photos from 1978 to the present. 39 countries are represented. Right now (2024), I'm short 19 families from taking photos of them all. Yet, I never will be able to photograph all the bird families, as there are too many foreign trips I'll not have time to repeat. Still, it is a fun effort to try to get as close as possible.
A friend in Australia — Tony Palliser — is making a concerted effort to photograph all the Bird Families in the world. A professional photographer, he is creating some wonderfully memorable shots along the way. You and I can follow his efforts on his web site: The Palliser Project.
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Tony Palliser has been using IOC list 12.2, with 252 families, as his standard. In the following 14 web pages I set out one photo of a bird from each family — using 261 families and the sequence from my 19th ed. Creagrus family list. Some of my photos are very nice and some are very poor. Yet, as this is the Internet, I can replace bad photos with better ones if obtained (e.g., I've just replaced a terrible photo of a pitta with a nice one). You'll find an icon of a guy with binoculars to represent families I've seen but not (yet) photographed. |
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On page 15 of this project is a personal gallery of previous families — those that were once considered a family by a major global publication (e.g., Austin 1961, Meyer de Schauensee 1970, Harrison 1979, Sibley & Monroe (1990), the Handbook of the Birds of the World 16-volume project, and a few others) — but that are now merged into other families. Sibley & Monroe (1990) was a watershed volume in its effect on bird families — anticipating much of today's molecular evidence — but also splitting cuckoos into 5 families and kingfishers into three but failing to anticipate the break-up of the Old World warblers into more than a dozen families or babblers into more than a half-dozen.
On page 16 of this project is a personal gallery of proposed families — by Fregin et al. (2012) or Barker et al. (2013) or more recent papers — but that neither Clements, nor IOC, nor Birdlife, nor my Creagrus project currently accepts. It is possible that one of the global checklist may adopt some of these in the future. Others may be abandoned as time goes by.
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| A final page 17 of this project is a gallery of "bonus birds" scattered across the globe, each assigned to an important birding region but for which a family member is already featured on prior pages. Each continent is a region or part of one, and some continents have multiple regions (e.g, 4 in South America, 4 in Africa), and others focus on oceans and islands. These 24 birds have photos that were memorable to me; many have a background story. |
photo above Resplendent Quetzal: 23 Dec 2007 Savegre, Costa Rica
photo just below Common Goldeneye: 27 Jan 2016 Monterey, CA, USA
photo at bottom Swallow-tailed Bee-eater: 5 July 2021, Ruaha NP, Tanzania |
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Literature cited:
- Austin, O.L. 1961. Birds of the World: a Survey of the Twenty-seven Orders and One Hundred and Fifty-five Families. Golden Press, New York.
- Barker, F.K., K.J. Burns, J. Klicka, S.M. Lanyon, and I.J. Lovette. 2013. Going to extremes: contrasting rates of diversification in a recent radiation of New World passerine birds. Syst. Biol. 62: 298–320.
- Cibois, A. 2003. Mitochondrial DNA phylogeny of babblers (Timaliidae). Auk 120: 35–54.
- Fregin, S., M. Haase, U. Olsson & P. Alström. 2012. New insights into family relationships within the avian superfamily Sylvioidea (Passeriformes) based on seven molecular markers. BMC Evol. Biol. 12: 157.
- Harrison, C.J.O. 1979. Bird Families of the World in Birds: Their Life, Their Ways, Their World (C. Perrins, ed.). Reader's Digest Association, Inc., New York.
- Meyer de Schauensee, R. 1970. A Guide to the Birds of South America. Livingston Pub., Wynnewood, PA
- Ohlson, J.I., R.O. Prum, and P.G.P. Ericson. 2007. A molecular phylogeny of the cotingas (Aves: Cotingidae). Mol. Phylog. Evol. 42: 25–37.
- Ohlson, J.I., M. Irestedt, P.G.P. Ericson, and J. Fjeldså. 2013. Phylogeny and classification of the New World suboscines (Aves, Passeriformes). Zootaxa 3613: 1–35.
- Sibley, C.G., and B.L. Monroe, Jr. 1990. Distribution and Taxonomy of Birds of the World. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, CT.
- Winkler, D.W., S.M. Billerman, and I.J. Lovette. 2015. Bird Families of the World: A Guide to the Spectacular Diversity of Birds. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.
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