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Roberts Bird Guide: Kruger National Park and Adjacent Lowveld: A Guide to More than 420 Birds in the Region
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Product Description
Compiling a colorful collection of artistic representations of the myriad bird species found in South Africa, this beautifully illustrated manual celebrates the diverse, fascinating, and unique feathered fauna found in the national park and the adjoining Mpumalanga Province. Featuring 91 annotated plates dynamically illustrated by seven of South Africa’s finest bird artists, this comprehensive guide provides details on each bird’s habitat, food source, behaviors, breeding strategies, and in some cases, their estimated population status for the areas they inhabit. Accompanied by maps and calendar bars highlighting the full and peak breeding seasons for birds of the northeastern regions of South Africa and beautifully photographed by experts in the field, this essential guide is an invaluable and breathtakingly artistic resource for birdwatchers and nature lovers worldwide.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1231323 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 264 pages
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Customer Reviews
Excellent ID guide narrowed to just Kruger NP
If you were to go to southern Africa and visit only Kruger National Park, this would be the only bird book you'd need to pack along. It is a nice portable size and weight; it contains excellent illustrations; and, it focuses on only 420+ birds that regularly occur in Kruger. Now, having just said that, I always (if possible) bring two different guides just to have a comparison between the artists and authors. Also, this book does not include the other 80-100 scarcer Kruger visitors.
The 91 plates do a superb job of illustrating the various plumages and poses of each bird. Nearly all the birds have multiple drawings to show the differences between the male/female as well as the adult/immature. Where relevant, the breeding vs. non-breeding plumages are also depicted. These illustrations are presented in a nice size with no more than 3-6 species per plate. It was a very good - and useful - touch to create a plate (#23) dedicated to just the tail and wing patterns of the six nightjars. This plate consists of actual photos of the feathers.
The text on each bird is one paragraph (8-15 lines) with 1/3 to 1/2 focusing on identification. The rest of the text briefly outlines the status of the bird in the park along with its habitat, food, call, and breeding. At times, the identification material is a bit thinner than I would like. I would happily sacrifice the information on nesting, brooding times, and food preferences for additional descriptions on the bird's identify. The identification material often gives good, additional tidbits such as "...gives itself away by scolding, ratchet-like alarm calls." An identification feature I also like is the inclusion of short notes written onto the plates themselves. These notes, with their associated arrows pointing to a specific area on the bird, help pinpoint some key ID features such as a yellow forehead, short white wing bar, or rufous cheeks.
This book is a distillation of a more expansive field guide that covers all of southern Africa. The same plates are used with some minor reorganization of the birds or the flipping of the direction in which they face. The text is nearly the same, but has just a little bit more offered in this Kruger guide than in the full southern book. This full field guide for southern Africa is itself a distillation from another more massive (1,296 pages and 10 pounds, 4+ kilos) and larger format tome. This huge book contains the same plates but provides an incredible amount of information on each bird. You wouldn't dare think of carrying this into the field.
Each bird has a range map, which incorporates 9 different colors or patterns. This system may be a little complex but it does offer nice information. A small linear monthly calendar is provided adjacent to the map to denote the bird's seasonal presence in the region.
This smaller Kruger field guide could have been made even lighter. The last 60 pages offer an etymology or derivation of each bird's name along with another 11 indices that give the names of the birds in Portuguese, German, French, Zulu, Xhosa, Tsonga, South Sotho, North Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and scientific.
For just Kruger, one other book is available by Newman (Birds of Southern Africa -- 1: Kruger National Park). This covers a greater number of species (500) and has a little more text dedicated to identification. However, range maps are offered for only a minority of the birds and the illustrations are not up to the same quality as the Chittenden book. -- (written by Soleglad at Avian Review / Avian Books, July 2009)
I've listed several related books below...
1) Birds of Southern Africa 1: Kruger National Park by Newman
2) Roberts Bird Guide: A Comprehensive Field Guide Southern Africa by Chittenden
3) Illustrated Guide to the Birds of Southern Africa by Sinclair/Hockey/Tarboton
4) Newman's Birds of Southern Africa by Newman
5) Birds of Africa South of the Sahara by Sinclair/Ryan
6) Southern African Birds: A Photographic Guide by Sinclair/Davidson
7) Complete Book of Southern African Birdsby Ginn/McIlleron, Milstein
8) Ian Sinclair's Field Guide to the Birds of Southern Africa by Sinclair
9) Sasol Birds of Southern Africa by Sinclair
