D. Ian M. Wallace

D. Ian M. Wallace (known as Ian Wallace or D.I.M. Wallace, or by his initials DIMW) is a British birder, author and artist. He lives in Staffordshire.

D.I.M. Wallace was the second chairman of the British Birds Rarities Committee and was a contributing author to The Birds of the Western Palearctic.

Wallaces's writing

Wallace's writing style has been criticised by others. In reviewing the concise edition (BWPC) of The Birds of the Western Palearctic (BWP), Simon Harrap wrote: "The Field Characters sections are rather shorter than the BWP originals, and have again been penned by Ian ('D.I.M.') Wallace. I always thought that the BWP texts were long, repetitious and woolly, but those in BWPC are merely short and still full of Wallace waffle. Far too much space is devoted to irrelevant and meaningless statements about flight actions in small passerines (e.g. Greenish Warbler is 'light on the wing') and to altogether strange observations about jizz, such as 'fullness of tail' and 'breadth of wing'. I read a selection of Field Character accounts for some of the more 'critical' species and found them very disappointing regarding the more substantive issues of structure, plumage and call. One some important issues I would say they are downright wrong ... Indeed, the Field Characters account simply ducks the issue with some difficult species ... On balance, I have to conclude that this section of the text contributes little and that I would never refere to BWPC in order to identify a bird"^[1]

Bibliography

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• Discover Birds, Deutsch (1979), ISBN 0-233-97100-9
• Birdwatching In The Seventies, Macmillan (1981), ISBN 0-333-30026-2
• Watching birds (illustrated by Alan Harris, Ian Jackson), Usborne (1982), ISBN 0-860-20655-6
• Birds of Prey of Britain and Europe (paintings by Ian Willis), Oxford University Press (1983). ISBN 0-192-17729-X
• Beguiled by Birds, Christopher Helm (2004), ISBN 0-7136-6535-1 (publishers' page)

Contributions

• A field guide to the birds of Britain and Europe by Roger Peterson, Guy Mountfort, P.A.D. Hollom. Collins, 1965
  • new edition of 1954 work; revised and enlarged in collaboration with I.J. Ferguson-Lees and Wallace
  • 1971 impression: ISBN 0-00-212020-8
  • 2004 edition: ISBN 978-0007192342

Significant articles

• Snipe and Grouse: English Bird Names in Birding World, Vol. 6 No. 4 pp. 164–5 ISSN 0969-6024

References

1. ^ Harrap, Simon (1997) Reviews: The Birds of the Western Palearctic Concise Edition Birding World 10(10): 400-402

External links

• Guardian review of Beguiled...

See also: Other people called Ian Wallace

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