I am considering purchasing this book... Is there a review on BF?
There is now:
Review of 'Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago'.
A book ruined by its layout
This book will be likely popular, because it fills a hole on the market – there is currently no field guide to birds of Sulawesi and Wallacean region. The only other book is out of print, with used copies fetching extremely high prices on Amazon. This is also in general rather solid book. The text is adequate if short. Illustrations are accurate, mostly lifted from 'Handbook of the Birds of The World'. Unfortunately, the layout of the book makes it a nightmare to use. It fells like a 16 volume mammoth HBW had non-Indonesian birds removed, was reprinted in too small size and pretends to be a field guide.
Unnecessarily, the book has hard cover. This adds to its weight as a field guide. At the same time, it is obviously much too short to fill the role of a serious bird monograph, and illustrations are too small for a coffee-table book. Maybe the book tried to fill three niches at once but failed all three.
The illustrations are technically high quality, but are printed too small. Images useful for identification, like birds in flight or immature birds are usually missing. Print size is small and typeface is difficult to read. Maps are unnecessarily printed next to bird pictures and clutter plates. The maps also lack clarity, being too small. Distribution on small islands is usually invisible. It is also doubtful if maps are really necessary, see below.
The biggest chaos is caused by authors' decision to rigidly use the DNA-based phylogenetic system. One might accept its scientific validity, even if placement of many species is obviously provisional. One might even accept their arbitrary decision to lift multiple subspecies to new species, which ballooned the number of bird species by several hundreds. Unfortunately, even then, the system is yet unknown among birders and throws lookalike birds far away from each other. Worse, the authors use lots of new taxonomic names, but generally omit the previous ones. This might be an attempt to increase prominence of the new classification, but makes field use a nightmare. One must constantly go to the species index and back, when faced with a flighty bird in the forest. Some very interesting birds disappeared from the names index, too. For example, a birder visiting Sulawesi would not find Great Shortwing anywhere. Instead, in some place in the book popped up a bird with previously unknown name Heinrichia. The only indication it is the species known as Great Shortwing in most books and trip reports is a remark in the text. The user has, however, no way of finding The Great Shortwing = Heinrichia other than checking all pages one after another.
The book lists masses of related birds with distinct distribution together. So an user is faced with 6 hawk-eagles, 17 myzomelas or 26 white-eyes. They are not confusable in the field at all, because only one or two forms occur on any single island. The rational approach would be to group e.g. hawk-eagles with other raptors living on the same islands.
In sum, the book should have simply adopted the layout of modern field guides to islands, like 'The birds of Melanesia' or 'The birds of Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands'. These books first list birds widespread in the whole area, e.g. seabirds and waterbirds, together with maps. Afterwards, landbirds and songbirds are grouped by groups of islands. This would allow much more efficent field use. The images should be 30-50% larger, and maps should be near species texts or at the bottom of the page. For many species, maps are superfluous overall. There is no detailed knowledge of distribution for many birds of Indonesia, and maps simply color whole islands, or altitudional range of an island.
What is painful is that this book has such a solid text and very good illustrations, but the wrong layout ruined it. One might dream it will be republished with a better layout. Even better would be a smartphone app, which would allow efficient shrinking the number of confusion species to one island or part of the island. Additionally, such app might reach far more Indonesians for conservation/education purposes than the expensive hardcover book.
