Birds of Eastern Africa: Updated Edition (Princeton Illustrated Checklists)

useful as backup to Wildlife of East Africa on birds alone.

I bought this book in early 2015 for a Kenya birding trip in July of that year. During my usual process of annotating the field guide before the trip, I became so frustrated that I purchased another field guide. I completed my annotation of this book, but never really looked at it again, and left it home on the trip. I took the Zimmerman field guide instead. Author van Perlo can certainly be commended for tackling such a huge task singlehandedly. It is not easy to stuff such a huge amount of information into a slender volume such as this. I believe that this book must have been one of the first attempts to create a portable field guide for the region. The author of such a first attempt always deserves some leeway.What makes this book so infuriating to me is the large number of typographical errors. After I started noticing them, I felt it necessary to go through it page by page, checking the scientific names especially. When I say typographical errors, I am not referring to out-of-date taxonomy, although that, too, is a problem with this book. I don't mind going through a bird book, species by species, to bring such items up to date. It is to be expected that, for example, the Sulphur-breasted Bush-Shrike might now be called Sulphur-breasted Bushshrike, or that its binomial might have been changed from "Malaconotus sulfureopectus" to "Telophorus sulfureopectus." One expects the occasional "hypoleucus" to be changed to "hypoleuca" when the Latin grammarians have had their say. Typographical errors are another story. It appears, for example, that the range maps for the Lesser Grey Shrike and the Common Fiscal have been transposed. That would pose difficulties for a birder unfamiliar with the avifauna. The specific name of the Papyrus Canary is misspelled "kliensis" instead of "koliensis" on the page facing Plate 96. On Plate 57, the species numbering goes from 1 through 21, but the text on the left-hand facing page is numbered 1, 2, 4, and so forth--one does not know whether illustration number 3 on the plate is supposed to be a Foxy Lark or something else. This was not the only instance in which a species is depicted and numbered, but no text given for the species. The matter of Mirafra and Calendulauda larks actually turned out to be an issue in the field during my trip; had I been stuck with this field guide, I would have more mystified than I already am.On Plate 16, there appear to be errors in the status and distribution of Montagu's Harrier and African Marsh-Harrier; Montagu's lacks the expected code "NM" ("Northern Migrant"), whereas the African Marsh-Harrier is incorrectly labelled as NM. The maps for these two species appear also to have been transposed. Again, there were other instances of this type of error. Of course, when maps are given in a separate section in the back of the book, and merely numbered, rather than given a caption with the name of the species, such errors are much more likely to slip past even an expert proofreader.There was at least one instance where two different species were given the same binomial. Misspellings of binomials and ordinary English words occurred often enough to make me distrustful. Here are some examples: Plate 26, genus for Allen's Gallinule misspelled; Plate 29, binomial for Madagascar Pratincole given as "Glareola Normanni," presumably confused with that of the previous species, Black-winged Pratincole, Glareola nordmanni (the incorrectly assigned species name thus having been both misspelled and incorrectly capitalized); species name of Somali Bee-eater misspelled on Plate 48; same binomial given for two different species on Plate 71 (both Winding and Carruthers's Cisticola given as C. galactotes)--and Carruthers's name is also misspelled here; on Plate 86, bird number 14 is given a red-ink number, indicating rarity, but the Greater Blue-eared Glossy-Starling is common in East Africa, and is shown to be so on the range map for this species; on Plates 19 and 28, spacing errors crop up; on text facing Plate 23, bird #3, the word "habitat" is misspelled.These were just a few of the errors that came to my attention as I prepared for this trip. The publishers have covered themselves in a way, dubbing the series "Princeton Illustrated Checklists." I can't imagine who would find such a checklist useful today. If one wanted a checklist, a simple list of species, sans errors, printed off the Internet, would fit the bill. An illustrated checklist that is replete with errors is much less useful. Having the maps in a separate section of the book is, in my opinion, a practice long overdue for abolishment. Moreover, there are many plates crammed with so many pictures that the thumbnail descriptions matching those pictures spill over onto a subsequent page. This separation would become a nuisance if one had to use the book in the field, especially if one were not already familiar with the avifauna—and who else but such a birder would use the book in the first place? Finally, there is one other peculiarity about this book which I have seen only a few times before. Here and there, the text points out an inaccuracy in the illustration. It would have been far better for the author and publisher to correct such things with a colored pencil or something, rather than leaving the reader to puzzle out such contradictions between text and plate. I do not have time to go back and look for those instances, but I remember encountering them.Reading this book, then, was an interesting clerical exercise, and somewhat instructive to me--once I had other resources to hand, with which to check it. I could not recommend this book to anyone planning a birding trip to the region. The author clearly knows his subject. Writing and illustrating this book back in the 1980’s must have started things rolling in the development of the field guides for the region. The author deserves credit, but the publishers should be sent to bed without any pudding.

I have an older version, so this may not all be fair. It is a great quick guide. The information is in very tiny type and the information is limited. There is no information as to their calls. The drawings are difficult to interpret in the real live bird. I also feel that it is incomplete. The driver guides in Tanz and Kenya use the Collins guide by Withers, which has more information and is cross referenced. I found it much more informative and easy to use.

Compact, great illustrations of males, females, immatures and subspecies.

Great book