Birds of India: Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives (Princeton Field Guides)

click here for more details, find new or used items	R Grimmett Used from £13.18 Pages: 384 (Paperback) ISBN: 0691049106 Pub: Princeton University Press Pub date: 2000-02-17 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 695723

Reader Reviews:

Very comprehensive, but not very easy to use. (7/7 people found this helpful)

The geographical area covered by this book is huge, for it deals with species that can be seen from Afghanistan, Nepal and Bhutan in the north to the Maldives and Anderman Islands in the south, with everywhere in between. It deals with almost 1300 different birds, that are illustrated on no less than 153 full page coloured plates. In general, a visitor to the subcontinent will travel through a relatively limited area and will not visit all the places covered by the book and that creates a problem. When used in the field a lot of time is spent searching through the huge number of illustrations to find the bird one wishes to identify. If one is, say, in Madhya Pradesh, it is pointless to hunt through all the species that only live in the mountains or near the coasts, but there is no alternative. The little maps are helpful here and a trick that I used was to mark the birds that, according to the maps, are likely to be in the area, thereby creating the equivalent of a short cut. That more or less works, but not all the birds I saw had consulted the maps, so this system is not perfect. There are problems with taxonomy. This book follows Sibley and Monroe's system, as does Clements Birds of the World check list, but local Indian ornithologists often use there own names. Porphyrio porphyrio is called the Purple Gallinule locally, but it is really the Purple Swamphen. That business can drive you mad and there is no easy answer. However, things would be made easier if the illustrations were accurate, then the purple whatever could be easily found. Unfortunately the colour printing is not terribly accurate for some species and that isn't acceptable. If this book goes to another edition, then the problem with colours must be sorted out. Just in case this review is read by someone who has this book or by the authors or publishers, then do have a look at poor old Porphyrio porphyrio - he isn't really right. Thus, this book is a laudable attempt to comprehensively cover a huge area, and it does that well, but it is hard to use and it is let down by the colour printing. It is very reasonably priced and it is far more comprehensive than the Collins book (in which the colour printing is better) so it is well worth buying. Using it is a bit tough going, but worth the effort if the problems mentioned earlier are acknowledged.

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