| Birds of Peru (Helm Field Guides) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Douglas F. Stotz, Daniel F. Lane, Thomas S. Schulenberg, John P. O'neill, Parker Theodore A. Iii, Larry B. Mcqueen
Creators: Dale Dyer, John Schmitt
Publisher: Christopher Helm Publishers Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £29.99
Buy New: £22.89
You Save: £7.10 (24%)
New (16) Used (2) from £22.89
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 125283
Media: Paperback
Pages: 656
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.6
ISBN: 0713686731
EAN: 9780713686739
ASIN: 0713686731
Publication Date: November 30, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
The long-awaited essential Peru guide... June 18, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
After some three decades of work, Birds of Peru was finally published last year. This is the field guide that was first conceived by ornithologists John O'Neill, Ted Parker and Larry McQueen during the LSU Peru trips of the 1970s. Residing off reliable mail routes, I only just got my hands on a copy earlier this year. I had used photographs of the draft plates of this guide for fieldwork in Peru in the 1980s and on later trips had carried a pre-publication draft, and later a commercial copy of Clements' rather unsatisfactory A Field Guide Birds of Peru. In short, I had been eagerly awaiting the finished product for 20 years, so I was very excited to get it. Suffice to say, given the original authors, and several others that subsequently joined the team, this guide was well worth the wait.
The first innovation is that plates, maps and text for each species are found together on a single spread, eliminating the need to flip from one section of the book to another. With 1,800 species to choose from, this is a distinct help! Secondly, this guide has over 300 plates - 304 to be precise. That in itself is quite an achievement - compare 96 for Birds of Ecuador, 69 for Colombia or 67 for Venezuela. Sure enough, there are more illustrations per plate in those guides, but we are still dealing with a highly visual field guide. Boreal migrants are properly illustrated, reducing the need to carry an extra field guide to North American birds.
The plates are by a number of artists. For me, Larry McQueen's are breathtaking. Perhaps that's a question of personal taste. His large, chunky watercolours capture the essence of the bird in similar way to another favourite artist of mine, Lars Jonsson. McQueen covers some key Neotropical groups including Woodcreepers, Furnariids, Antbirds and Tyrannids, which gives these groups a stamp of authenticity. Whether this approach works in the field is something I will have to test, but I can say that they look beautiful and faithful on the page. Although the plates are never less than good, another major Neotropical family, Hummingbirds, is - to my eye - the weakest of all the plates.
The text is concise and oriented towards field identification, with minimal or no natural history data - information which adds crucial extra weight. An indication of abundance, geographical and altitudinal range and migratory status is given in the first sentence. Identification features follow. The voice descriptions are, to my ear, accurate and pleasing.
Lastly, the book is sturdily bound (I have the Princeton hardback, not the Helm paperback) so it won't immediately fall a part in the field. Compared to a north temperate field guide, Birds of Peru is heavy - but then it covers three times as many species. It might have been possible to lose a little weight by eliminating some of the white space on the plates, but this is a minor observation. At the end of the day, one of the world's major avifaunas now has an excellent field guide. Essential!
Chris Sharpe, 18 June 2008. ISBN: 0713686731
long awaited and superb guide December 4, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Work on this guide to the 1800 species of birds in Peru began in 1974 but the death of the main author and the size of the job have conspired to delay publication until 2007 - but the end result is well worth the wait.
This is an astounding field guide with some very good editorial decisions: the illustrations, maps and text are on the same open page, each page has a short overview of the species shown, illustrations of the very problematical sub-oscine families have been kept at a large size to aid recognition and the text is cut to the bare minimum with the emphasis on identification. These choices have managed to keep the book to a remarkably compact size considering the ground it has to cover.
The real highlight of the book, however, is the artwork. Bird illustrations are seldom this good or this 'right'. A number of artists have contributed but the hummingbirds of F P Bennett and the antbirds and tyrants of Larry McQueen are outstanding. I was fortunate to see some early drafts of Mr McQueen's plates in Peru in 1990 (when I thought the publication of the book was just a year or two away!) so I am relieved as well as happy that they are finally in print.
Visitors to Peru in the late 80's and 90's had to rely on the huge 'Birds of Colombia', and more recently the 'Birds of Ecuador' and 'Birds of the High Andes' have been preferred. 'Birds of Peru' has at last made the packing job easier, and will make field identification a treat too.
Finally, if like me you prefer a robust hardback the US edition is currently a steal at Amazon.com.
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