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Best Current Fieldguide for Australia/Tasmania (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter cassowary
- Start date
Sent this to CSIRO after feeling a bit ripped off.
Why are ordinary, tax paying, Australians being once again ripped off by the very govt. dept that we support. I have pre-ordered and paid for my copy at $49.95 but now find its much cheaper to buy it in the UK. From Bloomsbury I can get it for $38.23, Book Depository $36.82 and online in Oz from Booktopia for $40.50. Maybe Barnaby Joyce should move your department to Armidale to cut the departments cost of living and pass on the savings to your tax paying supporters
Why are ordinary, tax paying, Australians being once again ripped off by the very govt. dept that we support. I have pre-ordered and paid for my copy at $49.95 but now find its much cheaper to buy it in the UK. From Bloomsbury I can get it for $38.23, Book Depository $36.82 and online in Oz from Booktopia for $40.50. Maybe Barnaby Joyce should move your department to Armidale to cut the departments cost of living and pass on the savings to your tax paying supporters
John Cantelo
Well-known member
My copy's just arrived - artwork is head-and-shoulders above its rivals but it's a hefty tome being roughly 50% larger format than the Collins guide (the same height & thickness of Sibley but with broader pages so that, unlike that book, it won't fit in even a generous jacket pocket. Maps look decent too & text sufficiently detailed. In short, it's the new benchmark for Oz guides. Let's hope that, like Sibley, a field friendly version is on its way.
John Cantelo
Well-known member
I've now had time to have a good thumb through and can report that the plates are indeed, as promised, the equal of anything found elsewhere and as far as I can tell the text & maps seem good too. The tag Australia's "Collins Bird Guide", though, is misleading since, unlike that book, it's not in the least field-friendly being a hefty tome you'll struggle to squeeze into your glove-box let alone any pocket. So often, it seems these days, bird guides are written and laid out as if for field use but emerge as something only fit for the bookshelf. Surely a slimmed down version (minus those extreme rarities & the denizens of distant Oceanic islands) that is portable must be a priority. The good news is that the birds are presented in an easy to use intuitive order broadly based on the work of Howell et al rather than rigidly adhering to the latest taxonomic order.
Birdscentral
Member
My full review of The Australian Bird Guide, including an interview with one of the authors, Rohan Clarke.
https://www.chriswatson.com.au/blog/the-australian-bird-guide
Cheers,
Chris
https://www.chriswatson.com.au/blog/the-australian-bird-guide
Cheers,
Chris
MJB
Well-known member
Chris,
Inspiring review!
I'll be raiding Dymock's in Perth in late August when I arrive with Pete Colston, who will be checking out the species account for Hall's Babbler for which he wrote the final draft of its description... We'll both want copies before we two old codgers go wild in the Top End and the Kimberley!
MJB
Andy Adcock
Worst person on Birdforum
Last edited:
MJB
Well-known member
Thanks, Andy! That's equivalent to £32.74 in today's prices. $65.99 in Dymock's Perth, equivalent to £38.72 today.
MJB
Andy Adcock
Worst person on Birdforum
sicklebill
well-known Cretaceous relic
The new CSIRO Australian Bird Guide is out, it has now even reached north Queensland, after having been sighted in the UK and Japan some time earlier!
This is now the state of the art guide for Australia, being authoritative, more or else up-to-date with IOC taxonomy (5.4 was the cut off so they seem to think that did not include Hornbill Friarbird for some reason, I must check back as I think it did), and with very good illustrations by 3 artists.
It's a heavy beast, it weighs more than Pizzey and Knight, so not one to slip in the pants pocket unless you want to lose 'em.
Text is compact but good and opposite the plates, with the maps at the bottom of the text page- this causes some issues as they are necessarily very small, so reading and seeing which subspecies becomes hard, though it works well enough with monotypic species or those with just a couple of taxa.
Rarities from the various offshore islands (Christmas, Cocos etc) are scattered throughout but are not too intrusive, and do make for handy comparisons.
I found the omission of body length strange, we now have to learn how to compute relative size by wing length, all very scientifically rigorous no doubt but a pain in the butt in practical terms. I am sure this was discussed at length but it will take some getting used to....
So, it's up in the same general league as the Collins Guide for European species and the Sibley guides to North America, now the gold standard for field guides. Well done to the authors Peter Menkhorst, Danny Rogers, Rohan Clarke and the artists Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack and Kim Franklin.
Price seems to vary enormously, anywhere from AU$39.95 to about $60.00, so shop around!
This is now the state of the art guide for Australia, being authoritative, more or else up-to-date with IOC taxonomy (5.4 was the cut off so they seem to think that did not include Hornbill Friarbird for some reason, I must check back as I think it did), and with very good illustrations by 3 artists.
It's a heavy beast, it weighs more than Pizzey and Knight, so not one to slip in the pants pocket unless you want to lose 'em.
Text is compact but good and opposite the plates, with the maps at the bottom of the text page- this causes some issues as they are necessarily very small, so reading and seeing which subspecies becomes hard, though it works well enough with monotypic species or those with just a couple of taxa.
Rarities from the various offshore islands (Christmas, Cocos etc) are scattered throughout but are not too intrusive, and do make for handy comparisons.
I found the omission of body length strange, we now have to learn how to compute relative size by wing length, all very scientifically rigorous no doubt but a pain in the butt in practical terms. I am sure this was discussed at length but it will take some getting used to....
So, it's up in the same general league as the Collins Guide for European species and the Sibley guides to North America, now the gold standard for field guides. Well done to the authors Peter Menkhorst, Danny Rogers, Rohan Clarke and the artists Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack and Kim Franklin.
Price seems to vary enormously, anywhere from AU$39.95 to about $60.00, so shop around!
John Cantelo
Well-known member
The very surprising decision to omit length makes a nonsense of the claim that adding weights helps to indicate 'bulk' since both measurements are needed to do so. Odd, too, that they don't either explain their unusual decision. The few books I can think of that have also done so have added a suitable representative silhouette (say of a sparrow or pigeon) on the plate to represent size. As "Sicklebill" also pointed out in an email to me, the index is disappointing too, listing birds in alphabetic order according to their first (usually) descriptive name, not by family. Hence all six "White-throated" birds are clustered together instead of under Gerygone, Grasswren, Honeyeater, Needletail, Nightjar & Treecreeper. This is a not a good idea as some are (unpredictably) prefixed by other qualifiers (Common, European, etc) making them harder to find in the index than if the family name is used.
Having done an entirely unscientific comparison with those species also covered in the Collins Bird Guide, I find the latter distinctly better written and easier to use. Collins also has smaller illustrations and, I think, a more succinct text which could have made the CISRO page size 25-33% smaller (although as thick unless extreme rarities and those from distant islands were excluded) which would just make it a genuine field guide ...
Having done an entirely unscientific comparison with those species also covered in the Collins Bird Guide, I find the latter distinctly better written and easier to use. Collins also has smaller illustrations and, I think, a more succinct text which could have made the CISRO page size 25-33% smaller (although as thick unless extreme rarities and those from distant islands were excluded) which would just make it a genuine field guide ...
