The birds of the Philippines : an annotated check-list / Edward C. Dickinson, Robert S. Kennedy, and Kenneth C. Parkes.

knowledge has, however, increased very considerably in the last 4 decades. This Check-list, bringing together a more comprehensive range of data than has been possible for 80 years, is based on an unusually extensive museum and literature search, and includes a great many substantiated unpublished records. Distribution and taxonomy of the 556 recorded bird species and their habitats are given prominence, and in particular breeding data are invariably given when any are known. Errors from earlier years, often repeated many time since, are pointed out and corrected. --Editor's Foreword

This twelfth check-list in the British Ornithologists' Unions' series deal with an important zoogeographical area lying between the extensive Oriental Region, with its many Palaearctic passage migrants, and the Australasian Region. There has been no comprehensive review of the Philippine avifauna since McGregor's definitive A Manual of Philippine Birds (1909-10), which has formed the baseline for any subsequent compilation of records and discussion of South-East Asian ornithology. Since the stable peaceful times of the Victorian and Edwardians eras, when exploration and collecting were so ardently and rewardingly carried out, wars and politics and their inevitable restrictions have considerably reduced systematic ornithological pursuits worldwide. In the Philippines this has been particularly so from as early as about 1914 to about 1946