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Title: The Birds of Ecuador: Field Guide by Robert S. Ridgely, Paul J. Greenfield, Frank B. Gill ISBN: 0-8014-8721-8 Publisher: Comstock Pub Assoc Pub. Date: July, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $52.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent Plates and distribution maps
Comment: I just received my copy of the The Birds of Ecuador and am very
pleased with it. I think the plates are very good with a lot of
detail. I compared plates for the same species in the book: A Guide To The Birds of Costa Rica, an excellent book also, and
found the detail to be better in The Birds of Ecuador. I also
really like the distribution maps for each species. I am
planning to do a birding trip to Ecuador and the maps will help
in making the travelling plans.
Rating: 4
Summary: Birds of Ecuador - a heavy weight champion?
Comment: I just returned from a trip from Ecuador where I used extensively Volume II of Ridgely et als' book. Having already some acqaitance with both the birdlife of the Neotropics and the bird books on the region I found the plates and the text still very useful when identifying the birds I and my travel mates saw. The weight and the size of the book is, however, making its use very difficult out in the field. The paperback editions did not hold very well during the three weeks, and publishing the book in 3 rather than two volumes could have helped that a lot. Even though the plates do not live up to the quality of the standard dictated by Guy Tudor in the, yet, two-volume handbook on South american birds, but I still found the pictures very informative. The text on habitat, altitudinal distribution, call, and the range maps often helped to narrow down the number of look-alike-species to a manageable level, especially when identifying hummingbirds or tyrant flycatchers.
All in all (and getting back to the question in the title) I could not call this book a champion in the league of field guides for being overweight (just try to carry it on the 'D' trail near Bellavista), although it truly deserves the four stars for the text and the plates alike. If you use it as a 'hotel' rather than a field guide or need it as a reference work for your home library (or have the plates and the text of Vol. II rebound separetely, as I did) you will appreciate the amount of information gathered in this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: A useful but bulky field guide
Comment: What a set of books, no doubt about that! For the first time, there is a full set of very useful color plates for one of the core South American countries. It is certainly a great accomplishment to have all the species pictured in color and on a more or less consistent standard. However, I do not agree with other reviewers who rave about the plates. Too many of the bird pictures have an overall flat appearance, with the color rendition being too simplistic or too bold. And while a good number of the birds are depicted in good or even unnessessarily large size, others would have benefitted from a larger sized rendition. Just because a species is small does not mean it has to be depicted in a diminutive size, unless there are larger species of the same group on the plate. Thus, while the plates are most useful, it is nevertheless disappointing to see that the overall standard (except for the plates being all in color) is rather lower than what was already published decades ago e.g. in "Birds of Colombia".
The field guide volume has excellent range maps and very helpful comprehensive texts. A somewhat more compact layout would have allowed for a smaller overall size of the book, however. The way to do it is being demonstrated in the book itself. The texts facing the plates use the suggested compact layout most convincingly. Spanish bird names are given in the main text, but, unfortunately, there is no index for them. To conclude, this is by far the more useful field guide for the general area than the also new "Birds of Peru" with its almost non-existing texts, lack of range maps and much less satisfactory plates. (P.S. This is a revised review as I think my first version did not do the book justice.)
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Title: An Identification Guide to the Birds, Mammals, and Reptiles of the Galpagos Islands by Andy Swash, Robert Still, Ian Lewington, Rob Still ISBN: 0300088647 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Birds of Venezuela by Steven L. Hilty ISBN: 0691092508 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
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Title: Lonely Planet Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, 6th Ed) by Rob Rachowiecki, Danny Palmerlee ISBN: 1740594649 Publisher: Lonely Planet Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.99 |
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Title: A Field Guide to the Birds of Peru by James F. Clements, Noam Shany ISBN: 0934797188 Publisher: Ibis Pub Co Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $60.00 |
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Title: A Guide to the Birds of the Galapagos Islands by Isabel Castro, Antonia Phillips ISBN: 0691012253 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 23 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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