Reviews 124(3).indd

J. McGraw, Editors. 2006. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusett s. Vol. 1, Mechanisms and Measurements: ix + 589 pp., 32 color plates; ISBN 0-674-01893-1. Vol. 2, Function and Evolution: x + 477 pp., 32 color plates; ISBN 0-674-02176-2. Hardbound, $95.00 each.—In his now classic Animal Biochromes and Structural Colours (1953), Denis Fox surveyed the “physical, chemical, distributional & physiological features of coloured bodies in the animal world” in only 378 pages. A second edition (1976) expanded to 433 pages was considered equally comprehensive, scholarly, and complete. In 2006, just about a half century a er Fox, Hill and McGraw require two volumes of 1,066 total pages, 23 authors, and 64 color plates just to survey birds! This is an important and timely contribution. Times have certainly changed, and it has all been for the good. By necessity, much of the work that Fox’s volume covered was done by a group of German workers beginning with Ott o Völker and lasting to the start of World War II. Fox, trained in England but working at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, studied fi sh, invertebrates, and birds into the early 1960s. His work on fl amingos, in particular, set the stage for young ornithologists’ tentative ventures into feather pigment chemistry. The fi eld began slowly, with the development of extraction techniques gentle enough to preserve the easily destroyed “lipochrome” pigments, separation on thin-layer chromatography, and measuring optical densities on primitive Beckman DB Spectrophotometers. It is astonishing, therefore, to follow Robert Montgomerie’s (volume 1, chapter 2) masterful romp through contemporary techniques and theory for measuring and quantifying colors in birds. By the last decades of the 20th century, there was an explosion in the understanding of avian color perception, techniques to measure and analyze refl ected light, the chemistry and physiology of pigments, and new and valuable insights into the basis and nature of structural colors. There have been dramatic technical advances in electron microscopy, and sophisticated tools to separate and identify pigments of just about every type (although there are some feather pigments still to be identifi ed) and exploration of the role of plumage in behavior. The argument that the world of color for birds is diff erent from ours is soundly made. All this and more is covered in these two volumes, which refl ect the progress and growth in the fi eld. With a body of knowledge of this magnitude, the reader may want to tease out information relevant to a particular question or subfi eld. It is all here. Topics range from the plumagepigment biosynthetic pathways to how they are absorbed, transported, and transferred across compartments. The consequences of dietary selectivity, seasonal metabolic changes, and their connection to the molt cycle, through the genetic input into the control of plumage patterns, and environmental factors that aff ect their display are all represented. Higher-level issues, such as the mechanisms of color perception, the determination of feather patt erns, feather-tract specifi city, and pigment content, are addressed. Further, the roles of colors in signaling such features as dominance or sexual selection or a dozen The Auk 124(3):1097–1099, 2007 © The American Ornithologists’ Union, 2007. Printed in USA. Edited by R. Todd Engstrom