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Rating: 
Summary: Valuable book
Review: The first part of the book is on "Birds as socio-economic resources" based on an International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP) symposium. The authors are almost apologetic in discussing economic values, emphasizing that birds are also important ethically and culturally. Fern Filion goes as far as listing Abraham Maslow's 5 level hierarchy of human needs. The articles are diverse, from the marketing of a 100,000 bird swallow roost in Canada (estimated to have a social value of 1/2 million dollars), to the use of seabird eggs and young in Tasmania and Jamaica. Hussein Isack presented a fascinating paper on the use of birds by the pastoral Boran nomads in Northern Kenya, which included birds as source of information. Honeyguides may guide them to bee hives, and other species indicate coming rain or danger. Although the Boran, currently avoid birds as food, the tendency to a more sedentary life may change this.The second part of the book is base on an ICBP workshop of birds as bio-indicators of environmental conditions. These papers emphasize that birds can be bioindicators since they may be higher in the food change and easier to monitor. This seems particularly true of colonial waterbirds and seabirds, where diet or eggshell thickness may detect changes in prey fish populations or presence of toxins in the environment. There is a series of papers also on waterfowls as indicator of pesticides and acidification. I thought Welsh's use of woodpecker numbers and diversity as indication of forest stand condition was intriguing. In Florida, birds are used as sentinels for detecting West Nile Virus.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable book
Review: The first part of the book is on "Birds as socio-economic resources" based on an International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP) symposium. The authors are almost apologetic in discussing economic values, emphasizing that birds are also important ethically and culturally. Fern Filion goes as far as listing Abraham Maslow's 5 level hierarchy of human needs. The articles are diverse, from the marketing of a 100,000 bird swallow roost in Canada (estimated to have a social value of 1/2 million dollars), to the use of seabird eggs and young in Tasmania and Jamaica. Hussein Isack presented a fascinating paper on the use of birds by the pastoral Boran nomads in Northern Kenya, which included birds as source of information. Honeyguides may guide them to bee hives, and other species indicate coming rain or danger. Although the Boran, currently avoid birds as food, the tendency to a more sedentary life may change this. The second part of the book is base on an ICBP workshop of birds as bio-indicators of environmental conditions. These papers emphasize that birds can be bioindicators since they may be higher in the food change and easier to monitor. This seems particularly true of colonial waterbirds and seabirds, where diet or eggshell thickness may detect changes in prey fish populations or presence of toxins in the environment. There is a series of papers also on waterfowls as indicator of pesticides and acidification. I thought Welsh's use of woodpecker numbers and diversity as indication of forest stand condition was intriguing. In Florida, birds are used as sentinels for detecting West Nile Virus.
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