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Birds of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands: Seychelles, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues by Frank Hawkins, Roger Safford, and Adrian Skerrett; illustrated by John Gale and Brian Small. 2015. Helm Field Guides, Christopher Helm, London, UK. 336 pp., 124 color plates. $45 (paperback). ISBN 9781472924094. Madagascar is famous for its unique, and often bizarre, biological marvels. In fact, along with its island neighbors in the Western Indian Ocean, it possesses the second most distinctive vertebrate fauna of the world’s seven zoogeographic regions, despite being much smaller than the others. Although the bird fauna is not particularly rich, with only 382 regularly occurring species, an extraordinary 41% of them are endemic either to the region or to individual islands within it. Endemism is just as startling at higher taxonomic levels, with no fewer than 6 endemic families (containing 32 extant genera and 45 species) and 18 further endemic genera (containing 43 species). Two of these families, the cuckoo-roller and the mesites, are such ancient and distinctive lineages that they are now recognized as orders of their own, the Leptosomiformes and Mesitornithiformes. For these reasons and more, the region ranks high on most birders’ must-visit lists. And for those birders who do make the journey, there is a clear choice of field guide: this new Helm guide by Hawkins and colleagues. Not that the marketplace is crowded—there is only one other field guide covering the whole region, Ian Sinclair and Olivier Langrand’s (2013) Birds of the Indian Ocean Islands, and the alternatives for Madagascar are now horribly out-of-date. Sinclair and Langrand’s guide is certainly useful and served as my main field resource for most of the decade I lived in Madagascar, but it has the intensely annoying habit of unilaterally elevating certain subspecies to full species—such as the Moheli subspecies of Madagascar Green Pigeon (Treron australis griveaudi) and the Madagascar subspecies of African Black Swift (Apus barbatus balstoni)—despite a lack of supporting research. Not only did this create unnecessary taxonomic confusion, but it also left one questioning the authority of everything else the book said. We can be sure of one thing about the new Helm guide: It is authoritative. For this is not just a field guide but is actually the offshoot of a much grander project, the mammoth 1,024-page bible on the region’s avifauna, Birds of Africa, volume VIII: The Malagasy Region (Safford and Hawkins 2013). An edited

the condor

Birds of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands: Seychelles, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues<b>Birds of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands: Seychelles, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues</b> by Frank Hawkins, Roger Safford, and Adrian Skerrett; illustrated by John Gale and Brian Small. 2015. Helm Field Guides, Christopher Helm, London, UK. 336 pp., 124 color plates. $45 (paperback). ISBN 9781472924094.