Bird Life of Woodland and Forest. By Robert J. Fuller, illus. By Chris Rose. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. 1995: 244pp. $64.95.—Chapter 1 provides a background to British woodland. Since World War II the acreage of woodland in Britain has increased from 6.7% in 1967 to 9.4% in 1980, much of it through increased planting of coniferous forest in Scotland. Despite much conversion of broadleaved woodland to conifer plantation, "ancient woods" (those that have existed continuously since 1600) still form 23% of all woodland in England. Distinct regional patterns in woodland in Britain persist: mixed deciduous woodlands with beech, hornbeam and sweet chestnut in the southeast; other mixed deciduous thence to Wales and central England; elsewhere upland sessile oak and birch woodland, with pine and birch woodland and birch and birch and hazel forests in Scotland. These regional patterns are the outcome of a long history of land management in Britain that has had significant effects on bird distribution, the subject of chapter 2. Here Fuller draws on the rich literature on European forests and their avifaunas to describe the historical pattern of bird distributional changes as forests declined. Some of the observations from his own work in the primeval Bialowieza forests of Poland will strike chords with students of tropical forests.
展开▼
