Birds of the World

How many bird species are there in the world? The answer depends on a lot of factors, including who you ask. There are four different organizations that make the primary lists of all the birds of the world. They are BirdLife International, the IOC (International Ornithological Committee), Clements (used by eBird), and Howard and Moore. This blog post explains it in more detail. As of its writing in 2019, the following number was recognized by each list:

BirdLife – 11,126
IOC – 10,896
eBird – 10,585
Howard and Moore – 10,175

Fiery-throated Hummingbird in close up

One species recognized by all four lists is my favorite hummingbird, the Fiery-throated Hummingbird (Panterpe insignis). It is endemic to Costa Rica and western Panama. Some years ago, a Spanish doctor and bird lover named Josep del Hoyo got the idea to create a Handbook of the Birds of the World. With so many birds it came in at 16 volumes and weighs about as much as an average human adult! New information is constantly being discovered but updating such a gargantuan set would be impractical. Together with Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology and other partners like the American Ornithological Society, they created the online version Birds of the World (BOW).

No longer limited by print size constraints, the online version has allowed for much more detailed accounts about the Birds of the World to be published. I volunteered to revise the account for the Fiery-throated Hummingbird and wanted to share what the process was like. The original entry was created by F. Gary Stiles (co-author of the original Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica and probably the world’s foremost expert on hummingbirds) and Peter Boesman. It came in at around 700 words and had 10 images.

The current revision I authored has now been expanded to around 6,000!!! words and has 41 images. This is in no way a testament to my personal knowledge, so much of what I wrote was synthesizing research papers Mr. Stiles (and others) wrote over the last fifty-plus years.

The Process

I was put in touch with the editors of BOW in September of 2022. Over the course of the following three months, I pored over around twenty different research papers and journals, interviewed a few experienced bird watchers about behavioral observations, and looked through hundreds of photos and videos to better illustrate certain concepts. As the fireworks were going off on New Year’s Day 2023, I was doing a final read-through of my draft and submitted it for revision at 1:19 am.

It then went through a scientific review by two PhDs and in March, they got back to me with two pages of notes on what was good and what to improve. At my request and their offering, they had someone on their team help fill out the section on molt and plumage that I was honestly not capable of doing properly. They caught an awesome reference I’d made a note of but forgot to consult (I couldn’t download it so it wasn’t in my annotated PDFs) that helped me to add much more detail to the behavior section. And the molt section they authored ended up needing to be reworked when I reviewed it and realized there were many misidentified hummingbirds uploaded by birders that were causing problems in properly describing the process (which they suspected but wanted me to confirm). Once we got the photos straightened out and added some more details, the article was posted in April of 2023.

For a time, the article was featured as one of ten free preview accounts for Birds of the World. As of writing, it appears they have recently cycled through to another set of accounts for the free previews. But if you’ve read all the way to this point in the post, you’re definitely interested enough in this resource that the small monthly fee to access it is more than worth it.