lgonz1008
Well-known member
Recently purchased the Helm Field Guides for the Birds of Ecuador thinking that it would be a good piece to add to my collection and it is always best to have a more up to date version of a field guide if available, but this one left me thinking I made a mistake, does this happen often?
I don't have a big bias set for field guides, if you ask me what I choose when picking my main guide, I like to go for quality over simplicity (ie: NatGeo Birds of North America over Sibleys or Peterson), and for the most part, I've been lucky that the few field guides I own that aren't from North America, are usually published by Princeton, but decided to give Helm a chance and now I'm just wondering if I was better off purchasing the original field guide from back in 2001?
Content wise the Helm guide is clearly superior in speciation and range maps, but certain parts like the facts that many similar yet many in number bird families (ie Tyrant-Flycatchers, Raptors, Hummingbirds, and so on), the birds look like they follow the same model with enough of human error to be written off as a simple mistake, which isn't too bad when you're looking at something like the egrets or even the tanagers, but I'm afraid when I have to compare nearly identical species like Yellow-olive and Yellow-margined Flycatchers or any of the Tapaculo species.
So, with my little rant out of the way, which one could be considered the best field guide to use for the birds of Ecuador?
I don't have a big bias set for field guides, if you ask me what I choose when picking my main guide, I like to go for quality over simplicity (ie: NatGeo Birds of North America over Sibleys or Peterson), and for the most part, I've been lucky that the few field guides I own that aren't from North America, are usually published by Princeton, but decided to give Helm a chance and now I'm just wondering if I was better off purchasing the original field guide from back in 2001?
Content wise the Helm guide is clearly superior in speciation and range maps, but certain parts like the facts that many similar yet many in number bird families (ie Tyrant-Flycatchers, Raptors, Hummingbirds, and so on), the birds look like they follow the same model with enough of human error to be written off as a simple mistake, which isn't too bad when you're looking at something like the egrets or even the tanagers, but I'm afraid when I have to compare nearly identical species like Yellow-olive and Yellow-margined Flycatchers or any of the Tapaculo species.
So, with my little rant out of the way, which one could be considered the best field guide to use for the birds of Ecuador?