We are the authors of "Where to Watch Birds in France" and wish to provide some elements following Mr Williams' criticisms.
It is perfectly fair to criticize any work as long as this is done serenely and in a constructive way. However, we regret that Mr Williams adopts an unnecessarily rude and near-insulting tone in his comments, especially so as we offered him, through a private message to which he never replied, to provide more detailed elements to substantiate his concerns and help improving our work in next prints.
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I am a paying customer, who has paid upwards of 30 euros for your book so I am quite entitled to give my opinions on it for the benefit of anyone else who might like to buy it. Rude and near insulting?? I didn't say anything personal about any of the authors, I'm giving my honest opinion on the the product I paid my hard earned money for. Also, if I don't want to reply to a personal message, I don't have to. You are the ones earning money from this venture, so, quite frankly, you can do your own work in substantiating the info you put in your next prints.
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We will not enter into details that would be useless to most contributors. However, we would like to note the following points:
- no book can be simultaneously synthetic and exhaustive at the same time. The role of national-level "Where to Watch" books is to provide a general guideline for casual travelers, recently-settled birders or non-expert beginners. What these people look for in such a book is an outline to help setting the major directions of their trip and not to be messed up with a detailed inlook into each single region. This is the role of regional guidebooks, trip reports and local information websites which are currently spreading throughout France, and we do encourage it.
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There is my major problem with the book, it's too synthetic and not detailed enough.
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- splitting the book into two has been considered and discarded. First, the delimitation between "south" and "north" would be as debatable as our approach. Many birders would likely need both and using two books instead of a single one would be cumbersome on the field. Second, the two-book approach does not solve the issue of exhaustivity, since an overload of information is exactly what you want to avoid in this kind of book which, again, aims at a synthetic overview.
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Again, I disagree, the more info the better. The more exact you can be to help an English idiot like me who has never been to the area I'm going to on holiday, the better. Please give me more detailed info on EXACTLY where to find the birds, I'm here with my family, I have half a day to go out birding. Do you see what I mean.
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- in general, these books are not dedicated to expert reader that have birded a region for 10 years or more. Such birders can only be disappointed as they will learn nothing and see only what is missing, from their own viewpoint. This is exactly as if a native of Paris was reading a Lonely Planet about Paris. Local experts know their own region better than anyone, and because of this, they tend to lack the necessary distance to grasp what is useful or superfluous to the viewpoint of a casual visitor preparing a short trip. We had the same tendency when writing our own regions and for this reason we had the book reviewed by various local and non local birders. Definitely, our book is not intended to local birders or visitors willing to concentrate in a very detailed visit of a specific area. There are better resources for them.
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I completely disagree. I already have the previous Helm Where to Watch Birds in France guide by Dubois, and also the guide to the North of France by Crozier. Imagine that this is 10 years ago, I knew in July 2009 that I would soon be moving to Verdun and was DESPERATE to find any info I could about the local area, not from a twitching point of view, not from an expert point of view, as I do not consider myself anything like an expert in Lorraine even after living here for ten years. I wanted to know what I could see nearby. Can I see Middle-spotted Woodpecker?? Can I see Black Woodpecker?? Is Grey-headed Woodpecker still there? Can I see singing Wryneck? Great Reed Warbler? Collared Flycatcher breeds here, amazing, I didn't know that. I'll be living under the migration path of half the european population of Common Cranes and I'll get to see thousands every year without trying???? I bought those two books and they gave me a reasonably good idea of what was here. If I fast forward a decade and then imagine I had bought your book, I would have found less detailed info on the above in it to describe my local area. If I refer back to my two old books, they still give me a pretty good idea. I don't know when the original two old books were written, but being honest, the info in your new book isn't the modern update I was expecting.
So if you want constructive criticism, you already have it from myself and from another contributor who has said split the book into two or three or four next time. Who cares where you draw the lines on the map as to whether it's north or south or east or west?? It won't be cumbersome to carry in the field as if I'm going on holiday to Hyeres, I'll buy that guide and not the guide that's going to give me info on Ouessant?? Why would I take that into the field if I was going on holiday to the Carmargue? I'd buy the guide to the Carmargue wouldn't I??
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- We have checked ourselves about 3/4 of the described sites in the past five years and the information provided has been compared with online data websites. The final product accounts for every single comment of the many local reviewers who have provided excellent feedback. Therefore, it is definitely false to say that the information is not up to date. That said, mistakes do persist, especially in the least known regions such as Lorraine, in which info about birds is notoriously less easy to gather than in other areas. Just as an example, the published chapter about Lorraine has recently been re-read by a local reviewer and he reported only 7 real issues (wrong species at a given season and a couple of ambiguous sentences), affecting barely more than a sentence each in the whole area. This is regrettable but it is the fate of any such guidebook, especially at their first print : even the most experienced bird book authors, reviewed by the best experts, still bear some mistakes. We have clearly accepted it and have provided an email address in the introduction of the book to incite readers to provide feedback, so that all reported errors and recent can be corrected as soon as the first reprint.
- As a conclusion, we believe that Mr Williams' comment essentially show that we've made it to our aim : providing a general overview of the country with synthetic information to the benefit of birders willing to a first outlook into the country, and avoiding to catch up readers with an overload of specific details, leaving these for regional-level books and online resources which are better suited to this aim.
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I think you should be providing more than synthetic information, and that's what disappointed me so much, the Helm guide is the same size as your book, is at least 15 years old, and if you compare the two then, in my opinion, there isn't all that much difference, and that, is in the internet age and with the utterly, monumentally brilliant work of genius that was the Atlas des Oiseaux, I can't quite believe that you've not managed to advance much on the old Helm book. As I say above, that's my personal opinion on a product I paid for. Please do a much more detailed version, it's what people want!!
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This message has been written and approved by the three authors.
