Books are never perfect. In the run-up to publication of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, I am all too aware that this is a truth that’s a cause of anxiety, and sometimes sleeplessness, for all authors. One category of imperfection is tipographical* errors have been introduced at some point in the process of writing and editing. In the past these were corrected in the first edition of a book by the inclusion of errata slips, and such errors are sometimes important in determining the true first editions of older books. On page 20 of the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for example, there is a misspelling of the word “species”**. This was corrected in the second edition but is an important marker of an extremely valuable book, intellectually and (now) commercially.
A second category involves errors of fact or interpretation or expression that, with hindsight and reader feedback, require correction, or at least acknowledgement, by the author. These are the ones that really make an author squirm inside, even though we know that they are inevitable: we are, after all only human.
It turns out that there are a few examples of both categories in the first edition of my 2021 book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. Some of them have been corrected in the second edition, but if you purchased the first edition then these are what you should look out for:
P22 – ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony later in the season’ changes to: ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony from spring onwards.’
P30, Fig 2.9 – Correct ‘Tabaernemontana’ to Tabernaemontana
P51, Figure 3.8 – title – it should read C. rhynchantha [there’s an h missing]
P57 – ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is on his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks through the garden.’ changes to ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is near his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks in the area.’***
P146 – ‘I’ve even see them attack and kill honey bees’ should read: ‘I’ve even seen them….’
P169 – in the title for Figure 10.5, Anon (2019) should be Anon (1919) [in some presentation copies of my book I have corrected this and initialed the change]
P259 – this reference: Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Fruit set of highland coffee increases with the diversity of pollinating bees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270: 955–961. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2306.
Should be replaced by:
Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Bee pollination and fruit set of Coffea arabica and C. canephora (Rubiaceae). American Journal of Botany 90, 153– 157. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2664.2003.00847.x
The last two have yet to be corrected and will need to wait for the third edition:
P119 – the Rader et al. study did not include birds and bats, just insects.
P262 – “Nabhan, G.P. and Buchmann, S.” should read “Buchmann, S. and Nabhan, G.P.”
That final error is really embarrassing because, as I point out in the chapter ‘The Politics of Pollination’, their book The Forgotten Pollinators was an inspirational one for stimulating research and action around pollinator conservation! I can offer no explanation for why the order of the authors got reversed in my head.
My sincere thanks to those readers who pointed out some of these errors. My hope is that Birds & Flowers has fewer, but I may be fooling myself…
*You see what I did there?
**Proof-reading is boring and soul-destroying for any author, but really Mr Darwin?!
***If there is an after-life, I’d like to think that Darwin’s now enjoying this error after my snarky comment in the second footnote. To which I’ll respond: watch out for a doozy of a footnote about a Darwin footnote in Birds & Flowers!
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 
Thanks for this. But a mere seven examples, two of them in obscure scientific names, is actually a very good record. I concluded my review of another entomological publication (that shall remain nameless) by noting “the regrettable lack of a firm editorial hand. I can’t recall reading a book as discouragingly and poorly edited as this one. Numerous errors appear, especially in the first third of the book: misspellings, disagreements of verb and subject, misuse of commas, unclear pronoun referents, incorrect word usage, muddled sentences, inconsistent use of capitals, and citation errors.” By contrast, here’s the conclusion to my review of your first edition: “This is a book that deserves to be read by anyone interested in the topic. Given the amount of research in the pipeline, it’s easy to imagine a second edition someday. One little suggestion: add a fifth word—Science —to the title…”
Congratulations on a third edition and your new book, Birds & Flowers.
Thanks so much Barry, that’s very kind of you to say so! I am fortunate in that the publisher assigned me a great editor in Hugh Brazier – he’s saved my skin innumerable times!
Where can I buy the second edition?
Hi Marcin – the second edition is what you would receive if you now bought it from the publisher or Amazon. Other than those corrections it’s really no different to the original. At some point in the future I may produce a completely revised edition of the book, but it’s not a priority for me.