After donating blood today (my 58th donation), I went over to one of my favourite bookshops, Abbey’s on York Street in Sydney. I hadn’t planned to buy anything in particular; mostly I wanted to check up on the status of an order I put in for Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie (Publisher | Amazon). Good news: a new shipment of these arrived in Australia today, and I should have my copy within a week.
I also saw that Volume IV of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England: Revolution (Publisher | Amazon) was finally out in the smaller paperback size that I have been collecting, so I picked up a copy of that.
And then browsing the science section, my eyes fell on not a book, but one of those notes that bookshops have nowadays handwritten by a staff member, telling you how much they enjoyed a particular book. It was sitting under copies of a book titled The Australian Bird Guide (Publisher | Amazon). The note said that the writer was a keen birdwatcher and had all the other Australian bird field guides, and really wasn’t sure if yet another one would be capable of adding anything. But she was converted by the unprecedented depth and detail of this guide, saying it contained hundreds of facts and distinguishing features not mentioned by any of the others. This really is the one Australian bird guide to Rule Them All.
So on that recommendation, I bought it. And flipping through it now at home, I too am blown away by how detailed and lovingly produced it is, with lashings of amazing quality illustrations – often 4, 5, 6, or even more different images of each species, showing both sexes, juveniles, intermediate growth stages, moulting phases, breeding phases, perched, in flight, and regional plumage variants. Picking a bird at random – the ubiquitous and boring silver gull – it has eleven different illustrations showing different growth stages and regional variations in the black and white plumage of the wing tips.
My previous guide was The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds (Publisher | Amazon), which I chose over the slightly more popular The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by Pizzey and Knight (Publisher | Amazon) after browsing through both in a bookshop some years ago. I preferred Slater because it was lighter, I preferred the illustrations, and it had more description of bird behaviour and less of things that I wouldn’t normally see like nests and egg colouration. But this new book definitely wins on all fronts, except the lightness and portability.
I guess this is a recommendation, then! If you’re in the market for a field guide for Australian birds, look no further than the new Australian Bird Guide.