Best bird guides by region...Central and South America (3 Viewers)

[Mike Crawley]

This is dragging this discussion away from the topic, sorry
Here’s a link to an NZ forum

Obviously incorrect reports on eBird - BirdingNZ.net

New Zealand birding discussion forum

www.birdingnz.net

 

[Jim M.]

This is dragging this discussion away from the topic, sorry
Here’s a link to an NZ forum

Obviously incorrect reports on eBird - BirdingNZ.net

New Zealand birding discussion forum

www.birdingnz.net

That's not a discussion about ebird's filters, but about user errors. Some bad user data is inevitable. Recruitment of local editors to address it is something that will improve over time. Looks like an editor said on the forum he would address the problems. The first two errors mentioned in the thread (I didn't check the rest) no longer seem to appear in the checklists.

 

[pbjosh]

I mean yeah there are a ton of problems with eBird data. It’s still the most powerful trip planning / bird targeting tool out there and one of the 2-3 best listing tools, despite the problems. I get a ridiculous amount of value out of it.

 

[ScarletTanager]

<snip>
The WCS was scheduled to publish its 3rd volume on Southern Brazil, but it has not appeared.
<snip>

Does anyone know the latest on this? I have both of the first two volumes, and they are so, so, so good, so I'd hate it if this project has simply died on the vine. The WCS website for the project still says volume 3 is due to arrive in 2017, so that's obviously not really being updated.

 

[njlarsen]

It has been reported that the project is dead

 

[ScarletTanager]

It has been reported that the project is dead

Well that sucks. The Atlantic Forest volume one is one of my favorite guides even just to browse/drool, absent any current concrete need for it.

 

[THE_FERN]

Well that sucks. The Atlantic Forest volume one is one of my favorite guides even just to browse/drool, absent any current concrete need for it.

Yet outdated and wrong (esp on distribution). Some of the illustrations might key you into the species but I find them somewhat unrepresentative.

 

[Mysticete]

Some one really needs to try there hand at producing more region specific guides to Brazil. Brazil is just too huge with too high a diversity for a single volume to do it justice.

 

[jurek]

Some one really needs to try there hand at producing more region specific guides to Brazil. Brazil is just too huge with too high a diversity for a single volume to do it justice.

The same is true about the most of Central and South America.

During birding in Yucatan around the tourist hub of Cancun & surroundings, both 'Birds of Mexico' and 'Birds of Central America' contain mostly birds which are not there at all.

The best was the Merlin bird packs of Mexico Yucatan and Belize. It avoided this lots of pseudo-confusion species which are not confusable because they are sedentary birds which are separated by range.

For the second opinion, I used 'Birds of Belize'. It missed only about 15 regular species, which list was kindly provided by another Birdforum member. They were distinctive birds and were well covered by the Merlin app. I took leaflets of these missing birds from other books, but did not consult these a single time.

 

[pbjosh]

Indeed, it's a shame that the Yucatan wasn't included in the N Central America or Central America guides. And there may well be enough of a market for a Yucatan specific guide. Certainly Dale Dyer with a co-author or Peterson could easily produce such a guide. Modern publishing tools will make the actual layout / formatting a heck of a lot easier than it used to be so I would think getting the contract and the author finding the time / desire would be the two biggest hangups.

Merlin is increasingly showing how a digital take on field guides where you can sort of have a tailored guide to a region can be super valuable. Of course that doesn't work as well in some countries / areas due to vagaries of how Merlin packs are split up and how political boundaries are drawn (ie, Indonesian political boundaries / subdivisions suck, and does following Brazilian political boundaries instead of rivers in the Amazon). But even what is already available is super useful.

Getting back to Brazil, a single volume guide is going to be an absolute tome if Bret Whitney or Kevin Zimmer or anyone else ever get something published. Even just a guide to the Brazilian Amazon would be enormous, as nearly every Amazonian species occurs in Brazil. Splitting it up as the WCS series had initially attempted to do is probably the better approach. Still a shame that project never continued.

 

[jurek]

Indeed, it's a shame that the Yucatan wasn't included in the N Central America or Central America guides. And there may well be enough of a market for a Yucatan specific guide. Certainly Dale Dyer with a co-author or Peterson could easily produce such a guide. Modern publishing tools will make the actual layout / formatting a heck of a lot easier than it used to be so I would think getting the contract and the author finding the time / desire would be the two biggest hangups.

Actually, on the same trip, my paper book never left my luggage. I photographed it page by page and used photos on my mobile phone screen. Which saved me carrying a book and taking it out and putting back to the daypack. Photos were not as beautiful as the book, but usable in the field, where I really don't want to admire the book. And, lets face it, field guides cannot really reproduce every tiny shade of the color.

Field guides should face a big change from predominantly paper books to pdfs / apps. And producing a pdf-only version should make creating local field guides, like the hypothetical Yucatan guide, far easier and cheaper. Printing, binding and postage would be saved.

 

[Mysticete]

Printing is, as I have heard from folks in the publishing industry, actually pretty cheap. It's editing, formatting, and of course art (especially art for bird books!) that is where the major expenses in production of a book come into effect. Conversion to digital isn't going to save on those costs.

 

[THE_FERN]

Printing is, as I have heard from folks in the publishing industry, actually pretty cheap. It's editing, formatting, and of course art (especially art for bird books!) that is where the major expenses in production of a book come into effect. Conversion to digital isn't going to save on those costs.

However, electronic guides aren't taking full advantage of the new medium, although they're getting there. Formatting especially is largely a legacy thing required by the constraints of the paper layout. Epub field guides show you can get by with fairly minimal formatting.

Artwork is a cost, but one wonders about this too. By now it's likely that every species has been illustrated multiple times. Afaik, bow illustrations can/have been reused for free (e.g. James Eaton's Indonesia guide)

Most obviously, there are now huge numbers of photos which can be used for minimal cost (and yes I know people take against photo-only guides)

In fact, the Merlin approach is the way forward. There's no reason why there can't be "bespoke" field guides based on custom lists of taxa for (e.g.) a particular city or region. You then just download those entries from a master database of all the world's species. Just as with hotspot checklists (on the webpages) the guide could be formatted for printing to pdf => paper. This progression is currently being hampered by Cornell'swish to make money through its bow subscriptions so Merlin isn't all it could be

 

[jurek]

Completely agree with the_Fern, who basically outlined how field guides will look in the future.

To add: if you have an electronic guide in a format similar to Merlin, you need only format it once, and then you can produce many versions of guides with different selection of species.

 

[jurek]

One thought is that it might need a minor adjustment of identification to the region, because of geographic races and confusion species. Identification sometimes changes depending of what / whether confusion species exist locally - an obvious example is Black-crowned Night Heron, which is distinctive in Europe, but in South America there are also Yellow-crowned Night and Boat-billed herons.

I wonder when anybody would make such a whole-world or a whole-Neotropics united bird guide app, with the option to select birds local to a given country / province / geographical area (e.g. Brazil - Amazonia north of Amazon, Peru - Pacific slope of Andes) ? There are already high quality pictures and photos of all bird species, and texts also exist scattered across ebird and individual bird guides. If his would be a group effort, with say 40 amateurs adapting 100 species local to them, the whole project can be surprisingly fast.

And would be a single biggest boost to Neotropical ornithology in the century.

 

[Jim M.]

I thought these threads were supposed to be limited to identifying the best field guides? That's why I check them. (And the technology to create custom bird guides has been around for decades anyway.)

 

[gdhunter]

I've got to express my agreement with Jim M. The name of the thread says it all, and imagine my disappointment when I find it hijacked by folks promoting Merlin as the future of field guides. I carry a pouch in the field when I'm in an unfamiliar place, and in that pouch I carry a field guide hopefully suitable for that place. I've relied on this thread to figure out which guides are best, and I've found the advice gratifying and informative. I don't begrudge anyone his or her approach to bird identification, but please: let's respect the purpose of this thread.