This concise, updated edition of the award-winning A Guide to the Birds of Southeast Asia (Princeton, 2000) is the most comprehensive, compact guide to this magnificent bird-rich region. It is a complete field and reference guide to the birds of Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. It also covers a wide range of species found in the Indian subcontinent, China, Taiwan, Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo, and the Philippines.
More than 140 full-color plates
All 1,270 species covered in detail
Up-to-date text covers the identification, voice, habitat, behavior, and range of all the region’s species and distinctive subspecies
Complete coverage of some fifteen Southeast Asian countries and regions
Product Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Essential Guide for the Region I spent a week birding in Cambodia, and this was a great guide for the country. As others have mentioned, the guide does not have distribution maps, which can make it difficult to pin down whether or not a species you’re seeing is where it’s supposed to be. The written descriptions of ranges do a little to alleviate this, but if you’re not familiar with the region, they aren’t particularly helpful.
ok, but a challenging guide to use in the field The work is for all practical and technical purposes well done and concise. A number of the plates, however, do lack detail and color rendition is in some cases comes up very short. This book served me “ok” during a trip to Vietnam a couple years back. However, a recent trip to Thailand showed me where it lacks in that what one sees through binoculars is not exactly what one sees in a given species’ plate. This often left me questioning my identification of a bird in front of me…
Best of the bunch Those who denigrate this guide because it lacks range maps are making too much fuss. You can’t cover 1270 species with excellent illustrations AND include a readable range map of SE Asia (I mean sheesh – that’s a Big Map!) for each one AND make it pocketable. As it is this is 5.75 x 8.25 x 1 inches – you need a big pocket. Just get used to reading the range as text, and familiarize yourself with the few mystical terms, such as “Tenasserim”. Compared to the amount of study you ordinarily put…