Finding Australian Birds: A Field Guide to Birding Locationsby Rohan Clarke, Tim Dolby
Rating: ★★★★★
Publication Date: May 15, 2014
Pages: 602
Genre: Natural Science, Reference
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
In the category of “books likely to only appeal to the .01%”, I give you this solid gold publication. As I live in Australia for now, and I enjoy stalking its amazing birds with my camera (purely amateur hour and likely even more entertaining for the birds than it is for me), and I’m rapidly running out of ‘new-to-me’ birds in my area, I grabbed this on a whim when I saw it at my local bookstore.
It exceeded my expectations, to say the least. Broken down by state, then by region, complete with common birds, not-so-common birds, descriptions, maps and suggested road trips to bird hotspots! I fell in love with this feature, as it includes day trips, weekend trips and dedicated bird-stalking 10 day trips. It then capped itself with a cherry on top by highlighting areas that also included interesting non-birding things to do, for those unfortunate spouses such as mine, who like birds well enough, but don’t find the need to stalk them, yet still find themselves dragged along for the ride.
I wish I could say this was part of a larger, international publication series, so I could urge my other bird loving friends to find their locals edition, but it’s published by CSIRO, which stands for The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; it’s an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research, so unlikely to part of a greater publishing series. But if anyone reading this is ever in Australia and intends to add some birds to their lists, you can’t go wrong picking this book up beforehand.
This book looks fantastic! I love that it includes suggestions for each region and, of course, the suggestions for non-bird activities. 🙂
It was really a surprise how good it was; I figured it would give me something useful, but expected I’d have to work to find it. Turns out it’s one of those rare reference guides I’ll actually be referring to a lot.
Brilliant. It does sound like a great book. I wish they’d have something like this for other countries. (Tho, of course I have not investigated this…)
I just checked the copyright information on the off chance they’d list an outside affiliate, but nope. Appears to be strictly Aussie. But there must be similar guides for other places in the vein that there are no new ideas. Maybe?