Book Review
CSIRO The Australian Bird Guide
The Australian Bird Identification facebook group loves this book so I got it for myself for Xmas.
I’m not overly impressed. It’s heavy, about 2 kg. Too heavy to carry in a rucksack or purse. It’s not pretty enough for a coffee-table book either, no phototgraphs.
Why so heavy? Partly because vagrants are given equal billing with endemics. In the case of the white wagtail, 18 images are wasted on a single vagrant. In another case, a single dead bird washed up on the shore of Phillip Island is used as an excuse for devoting three images and a full half page to that bird. There are lots of vagrants in that book. There are also many birds in there that I would class as vagrants but it doesn’t, for example if there have been only ten sightings in Australia. Do we really need 13 drawings of the NZ wandering albatross, only ever seen here on Macquarie Island.
Also, rare colourations are given equal billing is given to rare colourings as to common colourings. This takes up more space.
The 31 page introduction is too long for a field guide.
But the biggest waste of space is that nearly half the text is a description of the colours shown in the drawings. There’s no justification for such duplication.
In short, the book could be just as good at half the weight. I’m really quite tempted to scan the book in, reduce the size and print it out again as a field guide.
The best feature of “The Australian Bird Guide” is the maps. These are very much more accurate than all previous Australian Bird Guides. I have a few reservations about the maps – colours for different subspecies aren’t always easy to distinguish. The lighter colour tends not to represent ‘seldom seen here’ but rather ‘never seen here’. I have concerns over the map area being too big for some rare birds (eg. night parrot) and too small for some common birds (eg. rainbow lorikeet and sparrow). But other than those minor concerns, the maps are superb.
I would love love love to see maps for Australian bird species (and vagrants) that extend to other countries – but no Australian bird guide has that.
There are no lack of drawings, for example opening it at a random page I see 26 drawings for just three bird species. They’ve included a separate drawing for immature, juvenile or both for every single species, which is overkill. There are never less than three drawings for every species.
These are drawings rather than photographs, and this comes with some intrinsic problems. Although not as bad as many bird books, the colours are still cartoonish rather than natural.
I have red-green colourblindness, and flicking through that pages I quickly noted that the colour palette that they used is unnecessarily restricted. Browns are almost always drawn too yellowish. Natural reds may be crimson or scarlet, but are always illustrated crimson. Pale greys are often coloured too light. Blues tend to be drawn too muted. And iridescence is completely missing.
Bird calls are not well done, eg. that of the koel.
Synonyms for both scientific and common names are all missing, every single time. Not only is this an extreme annoyance to birders who use common names, it must also be an extreme annoyance to ornithologists because the introduction explains that many scientific names, particularly for honeyeaters, have changed recently. It also makes the index almost unusable. Look up “kookaburra” or “skylark” or “pied stilt” in the index and it isn’t there, you have to look up under “L” for kookaburra, “E” for skylark and “W” for pied stilt.
Another failure is the quick-find colouring along the page edges. Instead of 30 or so different markers down the page edges to find different sections, there is only one location and it only comes in two colours. Useless.
On individual minor issues I noticed:
- They incorrectly use “se” instead of “SE” throughout for South East.
- The musk duck is drawn too high in the water and the blue-billed duck too low.
- The Little Raven is incorrectly illustrated the same size as the Australian Raven, and similar errors elsewhere
- The colouring and outline of the juvenile Grey Butcherbird are just plain wrong.
- The underwing colouring of the adult letter-wing kite is shown identical to that of the black-shouldered kite.
- Occasionally the word “vagrant” is missing from the drawings.
- For the Herald Petrel, the pale morph is darker than the intermediate morph.
- The whiskered tern is the wrong shade of grey – all bird guides get this wrong.
- No mention of the orange belly on the male red-rumped parrot.
- For the New-Holland Honeyeater there are 5 subspecies on the map but only one is illustrated.
- The adult non-breeding Grebes are not well drawn.
- Colourings for the Rock Dove are insufficient.
- The guide totally misses all feral domestic duck and geese populations.
Overall. Not bad, compared to other Australian Bird Guides.
