Brief Book Reviews

China is a dream destination for both European and N American birders. It has numerous eastern Palearctic migrants which may or do turn up in both regions and an amazingly diverse and distinct avifauna of its own. What it has really lacked is a modern field guide, one that covers all species a traveller might encounter on their journey, whether it is to the coast or the interior; a guide enabling them to, firstly, accurately identify the birds they find and, secondly, to accurately determine the likelihood of a species turning up in a particular region. Is this guide the one?

For want of anything else it may well be, but it really doesn’t come up to the modern standards we expect from a field guide. Taking the two important sections of the book, the illustrations and the text, in turn, neither really fulfils the needs of the travelling birder.

Painted by two artists, primarily Karen Phillips, but also David Showler, the illustrations are not too bad, a bit naive in style and extremely variable in quality. Some simply look odd and some are inaccurate. Those that work well are the more familiar and distinctively marked birds (e.g. sparrows or thrushes); those that are poor are the species where very accurate illustration of structure, plumage tone and posture aid identification (e.g. Acrocephalus, Bradypterus, etc., etc.). Despite numerous inaccuracies and changes of scale on plates, in reality the illustrations are the best parts of the book.

The text is the usual, identification-guide shorthand. It gives you the bare minimum and is poorly edited. I found numerous errors and confusion reigned. Take, for example, the first descriptive statements for each species, which deals with size. For Black-headed Gull it reads ‘Medium-sized (40cm)’; for Slender-billed Gull it reads ‘Small (42cm)’. Another in the next few pages: Roseate Tern is ‘Medium-sized (39cm)’; Common Tern is (apparently) ‘Smallish (35cm)’; Aleutian Tern is ‘Medium-sized (34cm)’. Firstly, what do these descriptive terms actually mean? They crop up at the beginning of each section: ‘largish’, ‘smallish’, ‘medium-sized’, they mean different things for different groups – a Snow Partridge of 35cm (? – surely some mistake) is ‘medium-sized’, as is a Drongo Cuckoo of 25cm, as is Cetti’s Warbler. Secondly, they are inaccurate. Thirdly, where is the hand of a knowledgeable editor to check for uniformity?

If can’t trust the very first statement for each species what can we trust? This book will, no doubt, be used by those who travel there as perhaps the most up-to-date guide to the birds of China, but only until something better comes along to replace it. Let’s hope it is not too long.

US birders can order your copy of Birds of China with Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com and UK birders with Amazon.co.uk