>
> While I was looking at Morcombe in Angus & Roberston a woman came up to the
> shelves with an assistant and they started looking at bird books, Pizzey &
> Knight was dismissed as too big, and Simpson & Day and Slater were
> considered. I butted into the conversation and showed her the Morcombe
> guide, but she recoiled from it in horror, saying it was too cluttered.
> What she wanted was a guide which had the birds arranged in groups like
> 'small brown birds', 'small yellow birds' and so on, not phylogenetically.
> I suggested perhaps one with 'Common Canberra Urban Birds', 'Common Sydney
> Urban Birds', 'Common Bush Birds of the Sydney Area' &c and she agreed that
> would be good too.
Well, for this little duck, it would be a nice start if the guides could
standardise / optimise the order in which species are presented - there
is nothing worse than flipping between guides with totally different
sequences and having to waste valuable time going to the index to find
where a particular species is located. As for optimisation, put similar
sorts of birds together - eg true quail and button quail - if I see
something that looks/moves like a quail I don't want to be flipping
through two different sections because some pendant of a taxonimist
wants to separate them by 50 pages!!! [It would also mean putting
sitellas with treecreepers]
Regards, Laurie
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