16 September 2011
Getting a field guide is the first major step towards becoming a birder. Choosing that field guide can be a daunting task with so much choice available nowadays. To make that decision a little easier, here is a summary of some of the more useful books available about Australian birds.
The first category of books has to be field guides. They are the only must-have item in your birding book collection, everything else is useful but not essential. Australia has four main field guide offerings at the moment, not including photographic guides. Photographic guides aren?t always as useful for identification purposes ? you only get one angle per species, and that angle may not show all the required diagnostic features necessary for identifying the bird. Drawings on the other hand can conform to the artist?s intended purpose, and in the case of field guide artists the purpose is to show all the bird?s diagnostic features on a single page. Without further ado, here are the major field guide offerings in Australia.
Field Guide to Australian Birds (Slater)
The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds is one of the oldest of the modern guides, having first been published in 1986. Peter Slater has been producing field guides for a long time, having originally produced the first modern field guides, a two volume set (passerines and non-passerines) back in the early 1970s. His pocket field guide was revolutionary when it came out, but eventually fell behind the others as it was not updated for many years. Fortunately in 2009 a second edition finally came out, with updates to the text, art and list of birds covered, and once again the Slater guide was a good contender for purchase. If you are after a small, convenient guide that fits in your pocket and doesn?t weigh you down too much then this one is for you.
Advantages:
- Smallest, lightest field guide.
- Updated plates are good for Button-quail, shorebirds and seabirds.
- Good summarised text for quick reference.
Disadvantages:
- Raptor plates and others aren?t great for identification.
- Often not much information available in the text.
- No arrows to indicate important field marks.
A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia (Pizzey & Knight)
Another of the ?original? modern guides, A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by Pizzey, Knight and Menkhorst was originally published by Pizzey and Doyle back in 1980. After 11 years the second edition came out, and it has been updated frequently since then. Now up to the eighth edition, published in 2007 after the death of Graham Pizzey, this book has become an institution in Australian birding. It is the largest of the guides, and barely qualifies as a field guide because its weight and size are much larger than the others. Because of this, the Pizzey guide is the most comprehensive of the guides, with a lot more text-based information than is available in the other guides. The art is generally good, though for some reason is always printed quite dark on the page, which can sometimes make birds look a bit different to how they are seen in the field. The real strength of this guide is the amount and quality of the information available. The most recent edition is the only guide to mostly follow the official taxonomy of Christides and Boles 2008, with the notable exceptions of the Albatross group and Paperbark Flycatcher. If you don?t mind lugging around a much heavier book in your bag, and appreciate having better drawings and text available to help with trick identifications, this guide is for you.
Advantages:
- Most comprehensive guide, with most authoritative text
- Generally best depiction of diagnostic features
- Taxonomy mostly follows the ?official? list of Christides and Boles 2008.
Disadvantages:
- Heavy and large, would never fit in a pocket
- Dark images can change how birds look
- A small number of plates aren?t great for ID
Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by (Simpson and Day)
The next entrant into the field guide market in Australia was the Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by Simpson and Day. Initially published in 1984, this book has now also reached eight editions (the eighth published in 2010) and is loved by many. The art by Nicholas Day is beautiful, though not always strictly the best for identification. The text is good, though not as comprehensive as Pizzey. One of the best features of the guide is that diagnostic field marks are designated visually using arrows on the drawings. You still have to dig through the text to find out what those field marks are, but credit where it?s due, this is a very useful feature particularly for beginner birders who haven?t yet had time to memorise the thousands of field marks required to identify all the birds in Australia. Newbie birders may find it a bit confusing where some birds have different names to the other guides, though it is fairly easy to work out. If you like beautiful art, and want something more comprehensive than Slater but more transportable than Pizzey, then this is your guide.
Advantages:
- A good compromise between size, weight and amount of information available.
- Beautiful art with visually marked diagnostic field marks.
- Uses Birds Australia?s Atlas data to generate generally accurate species distribution maps.
Disadvantages:
- Too large to fit in pocket, too small to be comprehensive in the text.
- Uses some non-standard bird names.
- Art, while beautiful, is not always great for ID purposes.
Field Guide to Australian Birds (Morcombe)
The most recent entry into the modern field guide market is the Michael Morcombe Field Guide to Australian Birds, first published in 2000. The second edition was brought out in 2003, however the compact edition published in 2004 is the real contender on the field guide market. While the original guide is nearly as large as Pizzey, the compact guide is the next closest to Slater in size. It is small and light, and yet still contains a reasonable amount of information in the text. Common complaints about this guide concerns the artwork and the species distribution maps might be the least accurate of any of the guides. On the plus side, this is the only guide that provides in-depth information about bird subspecies, and it is the only guide that uses visually marked diagnostic field marks that are also labelled.
As an experienced birder I can put all the other flaws aside and appreciate how useful these two great features are. Beginner birders may not be able to afford to do this, as the art can be quite difficult to use in the field for identification if you have never seen the species before. If you are pretty good already on your bird identification, and you want a compact guide that will a) remind you of diagnostic field marks very quickly and b) give you information on subspecies, then this is definitely your guide.
Advantages:
- Compact and light, almost as good as Slater for this.
- Visually marked and labelled diagnostic field marks.
- Identification information and distribution maps are given for subspecies.
Disadvantages:
- Artwork isn?t great for identification.
- Text for east coast and particularly far north queensland species can be a bit misleading.
- Distribution maps can be misleading.
So these are the four main contenders currently. They each have their strengths and flaws. It?s a shame that none of them are printed on waterproof paper, despite being guides intended for use in the field, which includes pelagic birding where rain and sea spray is a fact of life.
There are two very interesting advances in Australian field guides underway at the moment. The first is the dawn of the age of eGuides. Michael Morcombe has teamed up with David Stewart of Nature Sound to produce Australia?s first serious electronic field guide (no I don?t count Simpson and Day?s CD-based guide of a few years back). The Morcombe guide is available on iPhone and will soon be available for other platforms as well. It comes with extra drawings showing birds from different angles, it has more text (because it can), and perhaps most usefully, it comes with calls for over 400 species of birds, including many different subspecies. Some of the calls on this application haven?t yet been made available on David?s own CDs, so even if you own all of these you will still find something new here.
The second development in Australian field guides is the forthcoming CSIRO guide. This is being put together by many of the authors and artists who worked on the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (HANZAB), and will continue and even improve on the quality of information and art available in that fantastic resource. This will be a serious contender for best field guide in Australia when it is released, and a lot of people are very excited by the project.
So there you have it. An introduction to the field guides for Australian birds. Another companion article to this one will be released shortly that talks about other books beyond field guides that Australian birders should consider having on their shelves.