Markus Jais
Well-known member
I can, yes.
Great. Thanks so much for publishing this book as an update to the 2001 volumes.
It will be invaluable on my upcoming trip.
Will there be a similar guide for Columbia?
Or Peru?
I can, yes.
Great. Thanks so much for publishing this book as an update to the 2001 volumes.
It will be invaluable on my upcoming trip.
Will there be a similar guide for Columbia?
Or Peru?
Neither of those, I'm afraid (besides we already publish Schulenberg et al.).
Any idea why Amazon are advertising an apparently new Helm guide to the Birds of Colombia, Jim? I'm guessing it wasn't published last month anyway!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Birds-Colombia-Helm-Field-Guides/dp/1408105349/
NHBS says "In stock".
The compactness is fairly impressive. It's only slightly bigger than the Collins Guide and smaller than (though a similar width to) the big Sibley. It's substantially smaller than the Ridgely & Greenfield guide but the plates are less crowded and have a lot more illustrations of some of the species. An extreme example of this is the Variable Hawk complex, which the new guide speculatively splits into Red-backed and Gurney's. The new guide includes a staggering 31 illustrations of this species (all of them of the whole bird) while R&G only has eight (some of which are partial or obscured). The layout is obviously far better than R&G, with illustrations, maps and text for each species all on the same double page (with the exception of additional plates for raptors in flight). The illustrations are fairly variable in quality, despite being by the same artist. Some are fairly good, some are not particularly impressive or life-like. Quite a few of the illustrations are the same as for Restall's 'Birds of Northern South America' so will be familiar to anyone with that book.
The text is good and clear, although it would be helpful to have brief taxonomic notes and alternative names - a useful feature of the recent Lynx field guides.
Heavy though for such a book at 1.150kg but it will become the standard field guide now I'm sure.
R&G (1.52k) does have a lot more text per species but is minus range maps, leave a few pairs of underpants at home and take both :t:
A
I just amused myself weighing field guides. Results as follows:
Collins - 881g
Sibley - 1352g
Ridgely & Greenfield - 1606g
Freile & Restall - 1168g
So fairly heavy but it's closer to the Collins than the Sibley in weight (and dimensions too).
Ridgely & Greenfield does include maps in the text section but they're not in colour and aren't as clear as in the new guide.
Heavy though for such a book at 1.150kg but it will become the standard field guide now I'm sure.
R&G (1.52k) ..........., leave a few pairs of underpants at home and take both :t:
A
The illustrations are fairly variable in quality, despite being by the same artist. Some are fairly good, some are not particularly impressive or life-like. Quite a few of the illustrations are the same as for Restall's 'Birds of Northern South America' so will be familiar to anyone with that book.