Birds of South-East Asia (Field Guide to) [Paperback]

Between February and April 2006 I tested my copy in the field while birding in Laos: It is an excellent field guide! It is very practical: plastic cover, compact and light enough for field use, texts and illustrations facing each other, good descriptions of species, relevant sub-species, voices, habitats and ranges. In addition the illustrations by 14 different artists are generally good to very good. I recorded about 160 species in two months and was able to easily identify several species new to me thanks to the good quality of the illustrations and the text.

One day while birding around Vientiane my Robson's field guide fell into the mud by accident. It was instantly covered with mud but thanks to its plastic cover, I could easily clean it and continue to use it as before. Most field guides don't automatically come with such a plastic cover and would be permanently damaged in similar circumstances!

I have used some other top quality field guides in other regions of the world: Collins Bird Guide by Mullarney, Svensson, Zetterström and Grant (1999) in Europe, Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (2003) in USA, Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Stevenson and Fanshawe (2002) in Kenya and Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by Grimmet, Inskipp and Inskipp (2001) in Nepal, among others. By comparison I find this new version of Birds of South-east Asia excellent! Describing 1270 species with so much text and so many good illustrations in such a compact field guide is a major achievement! However, some may complain that it uses the Sibley & Monroe taxonomic order and that species distributions are described only in the text without distribution maps. But the lack of maps - that would be inaccurate anyway - obviously enabled to insert more useful information for each species.

Overall, it is an excellent, up-to-date and handy field guide for birding in South-east Asia (it is even smaller than Birds of Thailand by the same author!). A real top quality field guide for the region covering Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. Congratulations to the author and the illustrators! Good value for money but be aware of the possible confusion between the 3 successive versions of this book. The first and more comprehensive version of this guide - excellent reference but bigger and less practical in the field - was already called "A Field Guide to the Birds of South-east Asia" (Craig Robson, 2000). For this new smaller and handier version just ensure that you buy the 304-page version "Birds of South-east Asia" published in 2005 and not the 504-page version published in 2000 (hardcover) or in 2002 (softcover).

Robson has taken on the monumentous task first tackled by Ben King thirty years ago; to produce a guide to all the birds of South- East Asia, and he's as good as pulled it off! I used this book on the standard Thai circuit during 4 weeks of early 1999. First of all I would say that the book fails to live up to it's title "A Field Guide......" It should have been designed with use in the field as its prime concern, disappointingly this aspect was not that successful. I left my Rounds Guide to the Birds of Thailand in someones car at Heathrow and that was a mistake. Secondly the lack of distribution maps at all, let alone next to the plates, made the successful identification of unfamiliar birds a slow process, it was my first time to South-East Asia so there were plenty of them! I found having to read distribution notes first very slow and frustrating. Thirdly Robson chose to follow Sibley and Monroe's taxonomy, the rights and wrongs of which are not for this review, however again this slowed down my task of identifing a bird quickly in the field and no one else on our trip was totally familiar with this classification. So why 4 stars? The plates are on the whole superb, particularly Christopher Schmidt's glorious Thrushes,Redstarts and Flycatchers, Stephen Message's Babblers and Scimitar and Wren Babblers and Clive Byers's brilliant Pittas and Laughingthrushes, just look at Spotted and Blue-winged. Hilary Burn's Owls are exquisite. Perhaps as skilfully completed is the scholarly text. Robson is a giant of the South-East Asian birding scene and it shows. The small text in the species accounts is a mine of information, 100% up-to-date and unbelievably detailed making identification of those female Ficedula's an eventual formality. This alone is enough to make it excellent value for money. Dispite my preceding criticism I would say that this book is indispensable on a field trip but is best left in the car, hotel room or tent. It would also come into it's own in the other less visited or well described areas in the region that this book covers where no smaller quicker to use guide exists.If you're going to these facinating lands of almost mythical birds no other guide comes close - buy it.

An attractive looking book but is suited more as a reference book than a field guide due to it's weight. I'm afraid the lack of maps is a major omission - whether I'm in S.America, India or SE Asia one of the standard ways of eliminating birds for ID purpses is by checking its range on a map. I also prefer the Collins layout of placing relevant information opposite illustrations, rather than having to checking a plates number and referring to data in the second half of the book -its just easier to use. I've bought it to take to Vietnam and Cambodia and scanning through the sections describing bird's ranges have only found one reference to Vietnam so far. I'm sure it must be described in a different way - but it isn't obvious.

Its strengths lie in the area it covers and the number of birds it describes. If you are travelling through the whole area this guide covers and had to take a separate guide for each country, this guide would seem light and easy to use.

So is it worth getting? Well it might sound like I'm suggesting it isn't but it's the most up to date guide of the area and I haven't yet found a guide that can beat it. I'm sure that in the future as more interest is taken in the area guides will emerge for individual countries with the information in a more accessible form. However for the time being it is the best guide I've come across for the area so I'm happy to have it.