Just a few words on the Birds of Paradise as treated in HBW 14. The taxonomy used is surely chosen by the editors of HBW, not by the consulted authors. Cliff and Dawn Frith are the world authorities on these birds and they are well aware of the fact that the Satinbirds were taken out of the family years ago, together with the MacGregor’s Honeyeater, with all the genetic research behind it to justify this. The MacGregor’s Honeyeater easily found its new place in the proper family and was treated as such in Vol. 13. The Satinbirds are not that easy to put away even in their own family. And family treatment would also mean for the Handbook team to go through all the categories of systematics, morphological aspects, habitat etc. This demands a lot of information and photograps which is either not available or at least not readily to be found. So, they conveniently retained them as Birds of Paradise which makes for very awkward reading in the first two pages.
You’re quite right about the Growling Riflebird. They should have recognised it as a distinct species. HBW would have been the first major work to do so.
The Raggiana on page 437 is not a hybrid. It’s a male of the subspecies “augustaevictoriae” and the same bird is featured and properly named in Vol. 2 of “The Birds of Papua New Guinea” of Brian Coates.
All in all there are many more things to be said on the way the Birds of Paradise are described and depicted in HBW 14, certainly as far as the plates by Chris Rose are concerned. Maybe somebody else can do that.