WorldTwitch Book Awards 2004

This is a reduced, paperback field version of the authors' West Africa guide, which received a WorldTwitch Book Award in 2002. It suffers from the same fundamental problem as the larger volume, namely that many of the color plates were printed so dark as to obscure colors and distinguishing features. This is a more serious problem in the field guide version, as the bird illustrations are reduced. However, the Borrow & Demy field guide should be easier to use than Van Perlo's even more compact and lighter-printed field guide, which received a WorldTwitch Book Award in 2003. The illustrations, text and maps are all larger in Borrow & Demy. In many cases, there are striking differences in the illustrations. Thus, to take one difficult example, the Yellow-rumped and Yellow-throated Tinkerbirds on plate 75 in Borrow & Demy not only look much different than the illustrations on plate 59 of Van Perlo, but apparent differences between the sympatric species in one book are not present in the other. Considering the difficulty of identifying birds in most of West Africa from portable publications available prior to 2002, the full-size guide and field guide by Borrow and Demy and the compact guide by Van Perlo rank among the most welcome additions to ornithological literature in recent years.

This is my favorite volume thus far in Oxford's Bird Families of the World series. While bowerbirds are hand-tame and extensively studied in parts of Australia, some species in New Guinea can be extremely difficult to locate and observe. Consequently, vastly more information is available on the species that occur in Australia than on the New Guinea endemics. The Friths, who must be the world's leading bowerbird experts, have pulled together virtually everything known about the rarest New Guinea species, while furnishing well-written, concise accounts of the Australian species.

Unlike the two other books honored in this category, Olsen and Larsson's Gulls is an identification guide for field birders. This book provides fast access to key issues in gull identification, which can be frustratingly difficult, with detailed descriptions of the numerous plumages, more than 800 annotated color photographs, and color paintings. It is the single best source for gull identification in the northern hemisphere and is likely to be taken into the field more often than any other "bird families" book.

This is a handy, very well-written reference that will be of particular interest to pelagic birders who want to know more about the petrels and albatrosses. The first 165 pages cover the history, biology and conservation of petrels and albatrosses. The remainder of the book is devoted to species accounts, along with 48 pages of references. A two-page account of the rediscovered New Zealand Storm Petrel with a black-and-white photo was inserted at the front just as the book was going to press.

While intended as a textbook for use in a college-level course in ornithology, virtually every birder will benefit from time spent with this heavily revised and updated handbook. It covers all things avian, from the origins of birds to forensic examination of feathers, and even includes a CD of audio tracks carefully selected to demonstrate the diversity of bird sounds. The handbook is well written for quick and pleasant reading -- quite the opposite of many of the books I recall from college, such as "Paradise Lost", Electromagnetism and Comparative Governments. Even long-time, regular readers of the major ornithological journals are likely to learn something from the handbook.

This is the best book about birding since Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book. It traces the history of British birding and the development of birding norms and terminology, and reports on some of the overseas trips that launched intensive world twitching.