Hi Wally,
I think the behavior you are seeing is "expected behavior" (but I agree it's quite confusing... and we do want to find a way to improve it for the future).
The "Statistics" link in the header is a dynamic link which only appears in a few pages:
* On the homepage it links to site-wide statistics (i.e. statistics for the Site "object")
* On a Community/Collection/Item page it will link to statistics for that object only
The "Statistics" link currently doesn't appear on any browse/search pages, as those pages don't represent an "object" on which statistics can be gathered on.
Looking at our issue tracker, I see that others have reported this as a bug already:
https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1392 It's waiting on a volunteer though to find a better way to provide access to these "Statistics" without having a link in the header that potentially changes based on the page you are on.
Tim