July 2001] Reviews 815 Anheuser-Busch Natural Resources Building, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA. E-mail: millspaughj@missouri.edu LITERATURE CITED KENWARD, R. E. 1987. Wildlife Radio Tagging: Equipment, Field Techniques and Data Analysis. Academic Press, London. KENWARD, R. E., AND K. H. HODDER. 1996. RANGES V. An Analysis System for Biological Location Data. Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Wareham, United Kingdom. MANLY, B. F. ]., L. L. MCDONALD, AND D. L. THOMAS. 1993. Resource Selection by Animals: Statistical Design and Analysis of Field Studies. Chapman and Hall, London. RIVEST, L. P., S. COUTURIER, AND H. CREPEAU. 1998. Statistical methods for estimating caribou abun- dance using postcalving aggregations detected by radio telemetry. Biometrics 54:865-876. SWIHART, R. K., AND N. A. SLADE. 1997. On testing for independence of animal movements. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics 2:48-63. WHITE, G. C, AND R. A. GARROTT. 1990. Analysis of Wildlife Radio-tracking Data. Academic Press, San Diego, California. The Auk 118(3):815-816, 2001 A Thesaurus of Bird Names: Etymology of Eu- ropean Lexis Through Paradigms?Michel Desfay- es. 1998. Musee Cantonal d'Histoire Naturelle, Sion, Switzerland. Two volumes, 1240 + 1288 pages, CD- ROM. ISBN 2-88426-021-8. $476 for the set or each component can be purchased separately (Volume 1, Cloth, $238.00; Volume 2, Cloth, $251.00; CD-ROM, $338.00).?This monumental work deals not with scientific names or "Linnaean" nomenclature, but with names for birds that exist in other than the sci- entific idiom?the so-called "common" or "folk" names for birds. The first volume is a compilation of such names for all of the species of European and Middle Eastern birds, plus a few others that are al- most universally known, such as the domestic fowl (Gallus gallus) and the Ostrich (Struthio camelus). Un- fortunately, the introductory material does not clear- ly state or list which languages are included, but most of them appear in the list of abbreviations. Names for birds have been sought in Indo-European languages including "Iranian, Caucasian, and Ham- ito-Semitic languages" because "the area covered by these languages includes the Palaearctic region, a zoogeographical entity within which can be found most of the European bird species. . . ." Names in Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian are omitted be- cause they are not Indo-European languages. Names from languages written with different alphabet char- acters, such as Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek, are transliterated with Roman characters. The first volume proceeds species by species, with each account consisting of a list of names, given lan- guage by language, arranged in a geographical se- quence more or less from the northwest (British Isles) to the south and east. All names that the author could discover are presented along with information on the counties or provinces in which each name, no matter how local, is used. The amount of detail is staggering. The section on names for the Magpie (Pica pica), for example, comprises 13 pages, of which more than 6 deal only with names used in Germany. Being Swiss, with an interest in etymology, Des- fayes naturally has several languages at his com- mand and has written his book using more than one. In the species accounts, explanatory remarks are generally in French, except for names from the Brit- ish Isles, for which English is used. Remarks about German names seem to be in either German or En- glish. Definitions in Volume Two may be in either English or French. Anyone who is linguistically chal- lenged would have considerable difficulty using this work, but would have little need for it in any case. The second volume is less easily characterized. About two-thirds of it consists of what Desfayes re- fers to as his "paradigms" (Appendices 3-14). Here, names or the words used in names, along with var- ious cognates (or perhaps pseudocognates), are ar- ranged according to qualities, somewhat in the man- ner of the familiar Roger's Thesaurus of English words. The major groupings include terms of chro- matic origin (e.g. red, dark, spotted), morphological (e.g. tall, tufted, swollen), acoustic (mostly onomato- poetic), kinetic (e.g. fly, wag, dive), and others. The ultimate subheadings are combinations of sounds used in words that Desfayes identifies as be- ing related to a given quality. Thus, section 3.2.54.2 is a list of words that contain the sounds "r-p" and mean "red", including the Greek, Latin, English, Czech and other words for turnip (rapys, rapa, rape, repka). The list also contains a Russian word for men- strues (repaki), Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Ukranian and other words for linnet, robin, and whinchat (repka, rzepoluch, repel, repalsic), and a French word for the caruncles of a turkey (roupie), among others. There are fascinating diversions to be encountered here. For example, we learn that the traditional (and believable) derivation of "belladonna" is folk ety- mology, and that "mayonnaise," according to Des- fayes, is related to words meaning flecked or spotted, and is not derived from the siege of Port Mahon, Mi- norca, as given in many etymologies. These para- digms will be of as much interest to philologists and 816 Reviews [Auk, Vol. 118 ethnolinguists as they may be to ornithologists. That great erudition, maybe even genius, has been exer- cised in their compilation is scarcely to be doubted, though I cannot shake off the impression that they may reflect considerable idiosyncrasy as well. The second volume also contains various other lists of bird names, including those in ancient lan- guages, words for nests, eggs, and bats, terms used in falconry, and bird names from "overseas franco- phone countries" and Latin America. There is no index, because this would have added more than 700 pages to the work. The CD-ROM, therefore, is an absolute necessity. If, for example, one encountered an unknown word for some Euro- pean bird and wanted to know to what species it ap- plied, there would be no practical way to find it with- out searching the text with a computer. I have little doubt that it would be found, however. Michel Des- fayes has presented us with a labor of love of such scope as to leave thoughtful reviewers with a lingering sense of their own deficiencies.?STORRS L. OLSON, Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560, USA. E-mail: olson.storrs@nmnh.si.edu The Auk 118(3):816, 2001 Albatrosses?W. L. N. Tickell. 2000. Pica Press (Helm Information Ltd.), Sussex, United Kingdom. 488 pp., 52 color plates + text figures. ISBN 1-873403- 94-1. Cloth $60.00.?W. L. N. (Lance) Tickell can tru- ly be considered one of the fathers of albatross re- search. In 1958, he started banding Wandering Albatrosses on Bird Island, South Georgia, and that formed the nucleus of the long-term population study of that species which continues to this day. I still remember the thrill, some 30 years later, of en- countering some of the birds Lance had banded as adults when I too was fortunate enough to work on Bird Island (even though those particular birds might have been only about halfway through their remarkable lives!). The book Albatrosses represents a superb, and fitting, conclusion to Tickell's more than 30 years of professional involvement with these mag- nificent birds, and it provides the most comprehen- sive, comparative account of the albatross family currently available. The bulk of the book, 10 chapters in all, detail each of the 13 species or sub-species of albatross, orga- nized from a geographical perspective: the southern, tropical, and northern albatrosses. Each of those sec- tions commences with an overview of the relevant oceans, oceanography, bathymetry, and meteorolo- gy. Each chapter is rich in historical and geographi- cal information on the discovery and exploration of the many breeding islands as well as the different species themselves. Every breeding island is dealt with individually, with maps indicating all breeding sites, and tables summarizing breeding populations. All aspects of albatross biology are then covered spe- cies by species, including breeding ecology and pop- ulation dynamics, food, parasites and disease, and predators. Those sections are well illustrated with line drawings and include examples of most of the exciting at-sea distribution and foraging data that have only recently been obtained using remote-sens- ing and satellite tracking. The species accounts are preceded by a general introduction (Chapters 1 and 2) dealing with issues such as basic anatomy, simi- larities and differences with the albatrosses' closest relatives, the petrels, and the current controversy over albatross classification. Following the species accounts, Chapters 13-16 review and synthesize as- pects of comparative biology (molt, flight, behavior, and ecology), and the text concludes with two chap- ters on human relations and attitudes towards al- batrosses, including a fine collection of albatross po- etry. The book also contains a substantial appendix, with a checklist, morphological measurements, egg size, diet, aging criteria, behavior, and population es- timates for all breeding locations, together with an extensive bibliography (with references up to and in- cluding 1999). In general, the book is very well produced, and the text is well written and highly readable. The general reader (including nonornithologists) will find much of interest here (and they should not be put off by the opening of the Introductory chapter in which "cla- distic," "trinomials," and "mitochondrial cyto- chrome b" appear in rapid succession without ex- planation or definition!). For me, the highlights of the book included the "Photographic Section" with col- or photographs of each species (many taken by the author himself), and the line drawings by Robin Pry- therch, which superbly and delightfully illustrate many of the albatross' complex courtship behaviors. However, the text is also sufficiently detailed and comprehensive enough to be of great value to the professional biologist (especially for the detailed population data). The book will perhaps be most of- ten visited as a reference text rather than being read cover to cover. Albatrosses would make a fine gift for any amateur ornithologist and should be on the book shelf of all seabird biologists.?TONY D. WILLIAMS, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Eraser Univer- sity, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada. E- mail: tdwillia@sfu.ca