NOTE TO BROWSERS III
CONNECTIVITY, CROSS-REFERENCES AND NUMBERS The three pages preceding this one are first and foremost a list of contents; a quick reference to the first page on which each family appears. The headers to the righthand pages in any two-page spread will also help here. If searching for a genus without knowing its family use the index. The index to scientific names lists every subspecies, species and genus that we list; it does not include scientific names in the footnotes – and index to these will be placed on the CD to volume 2. Science progresses through publication of ideas and their acceptance or rejection. Historians and others often wish to examine what has changed and for this reason we provide not only a guide to where to find the start point of families as they are listed in this edition, but also where that point was in last edition, and where it was in the seminal Peters’ Check-list series which, despite its shortcomings – such as taxonomic decisions made by the editors with no explanation, nor, usually, any prior peer-reviewed publication, and limited provision of synonymies in some parts, was robust enough to command admiration and a wide degree of respect for most of the content – as a basis in which to build. In the table of contents quick cross-references are given for each recognised family to where they are found in both these works. In 2003 our 3rd edition tabulated the number of genera and species per family; in this edition we also include subspecies and show, with the help of BirdLife International, how many species or subspecies are considered extinct. If we compare the numbers from the 2003 edition and this one the comparison is as follows: 2003
2013
Non-passerine genera
936
983
Non-passerine species
3752
4072
The increased numbers of species come from new species described since mid 2001, additional compelling evidence for separating species and, sometimes, a reevaluation of our previous judgements. Since this work was sent to the printers more new species have been named!