| Birds of South-East Asia (Field Guide to) | 
 enlarge | Author: Craig Robson
Publisher: New Holland Publishers Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £11.10
You Save: £8.89 (44%)
New (25) Used (4) from £11.10
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 94075
Media: Paperback
Edition: Concise Ed.
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1843307464
EAN: 9781843307464
ASIN: 1843307464
Publication Date: September 1, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Great achievement in a small package December 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wanted one field guide that would cover Thailand and Cambodia, and this is the only choice. The plates are just big enough for clarity and to show differential details between species; the information on distribution by area and season was again enough to work from - and better than using more space for maps that would have been far too generalised. To get this much into so small a book and make it so useful is a job well done. Recommended.
A compact and top quality field guide for SE Asia! May 23, 2006
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
Between February and April 2006 I tested my copy in the field while birding in Laos: It is an excellent field guide! It is very practical: plastic cover, compact and light enough for field use, texts and illustrations facing each other, good descriptions of species, relevant sub-species, voices, habitats and ranges. In addition the illustrations by 14 different artists are generally good to very good. I recorded about 160 species in two months and was able to easily identify several species new to me thanks to the good quality of the illustrations and the text.
One day while birding around Vientiane my Robson's field guide fell into the mud by accident. It was instantly covered with mud but thanks to its plastic cover, I could easily clean it and continue to use it as before. Most field guides don't automatically come with such a plastic cover and would be permanently damaged in similar circumstances!
I have used some other top quality field guides in other regions of the world: Collins Bird Guide by Mullarney, Svensson, Zetterström and Grant (1999) in Europe, Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (2003) in USA, Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Stevenson and Fanshawe (2002) in Kenya and Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by Grimmet, Inskipp and Inskipp (2001) in Nepal, among others. By comparison I find this new version of Birds of South-east Asia excellent! Describing 1270 species with so much text and so many good illustrations in such a compact field guide is a major achievement! However, some may complain that it uses the Sibley & Monroe taxonomic order and that species distributions are described only in the text without distribution maps. But the lack of maps - that would be inaccurate anyway - obviously enabled to insert more useful information for each species.
Overall, it is an excellent, up-to-date and handy field guide for birding in South-east Asia (it is even smaller than Birds of Thailand by the same author!). A real top quality field guide for the region covering Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. Congratulations to the author and the illustrators! Good value for money but be aware of the possible confusion between the 3 successive versions of this book. The first and more comprehensive version of this guide - excellent reference but bigger and less practical in the field - was already called "A Field Guide to the Birds of South-east Asia" (Craig Robson, 2000). For this new smaller and handier version just ensure that you buy the 304-page version "Birds of South-east Asia" published in 2005 and not the 504-page version published in 2000 (hardcover) or in 2002 (softcover).
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