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Birds of Southern India (Helm Field Guides)
 
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Birds of Southern India (Helm Field Guides) [Paperback]

Richard Grimmett , Tim Inskipp
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £24.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Birds of Southern India (Helm Field Guides) + South India and Kerala: Regional Guide (Lonely Planet Country & Regional Guides) + The Rough Guide to Kerala
Price For All Three: £40.57

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Product details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Christopher Helm Publishers Ltd (24 May 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0713651644
  • ISBN-13: 978-0713651645
  • Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.6 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 224,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Richard Grimmett
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Product Description

Review

'the ideal travelling companion for any birding trip to peninsular India' Birding World

Product Description

This guide is a successor to the much acclaimed Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by the same authors. Covering southern India, the superb plates are accompanied by a succinct text highlighting identification, voice, habitat, altitudinal range, distribution and status. The text is on facing pages to the plates, for easy reference. Like previous guides covering Bhutan, Northern India and Nepal, this guide is a perfect size for use in the field and will be an essential companion when visiting this region.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is one of several books popular with birders visiting Goa, which is fast becoming a mainstream birdwatching destination.

I found it useful most of the time but was frequently dissatisfied.

Most of the drawings are pretty good, but some are clearly taken from skins and don't portray the birds in their normal/natural positions. The leafbirds are a case in point - the colours and patterns are correct, but the birds don't really look like that when seen in a tree because of their posture.

Information on vocalisation is sporadic at best and frequently non-existent. Anyone who has watched birds in a forest setting, almost certainly the most exciting birding in this part of India, will know how useful a good description of a call/song can be.

There are no distribution maps. This is frustrating when you've spent 15 minutes trying to determine if the bird you're looking at is species a or species b, only to learn that species a does not occur within 500 miles.

Some birds are shown in flight only, e.g. the gulls. The gulls page actually looks a mess and it can be hard to determine which drawing relates to which bird. At least half the gulls we saw were at rest, so flight pictures were of limited use.

The 'status' recording is unusual. Birds are described as cr, nr, v, cw, nw, cp, np etc. where c=common, n=non-common, r=resident, v=vagrant, p=passage and w=winter. This gives very little info on the relative abundance of species and nr seems to cover birds that you might see once a day (e.g. Indian Robin) and birds that you might only see once in a lifetime (e.g. Sri Lankan Frogmouth).

I'd rather have the book than not, but it doesn't compare favourably against the well known European field guides.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have just purchased this book for a birdwatching trip to kerala. Although not fully tested as haven't done the trip yet I am very pleased with what I see. Like all good field guides, the key is to get the correct balance between the weight & size of the book and making sure the book has all the needed information in it. This book seems to have got the balance exactly right, with nice illustrations and user friendly text. As I am backpacking I really didn't want anything too weighty and cumbersome so initially purchased the much smaller Collins handguide to the birds of the Indian Sub-Continent. Although a lovely little book it was obvious that many of the birds that I will be seeing were not illustrated in the book. It seemed ideal for the casual birdwatcher but not for serious birdwatching, so I needed something with more in it. After researching it was clear that this was the book to get and I am pleased that it is not too big and heavy to carry around whilst listing all the birds that I am likely to see. I don't think that there is a better field guide out at the moment for birdwatching in southern india.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Although not a true ornithologist, I needed information for my recent visit to the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary (Thattekkad, Kerala). There are very few good guides currently in publication which are specific to the birds of Southern India - and this is one of those. I found it indispensable, even though I was fortunate to be accompanied on my visit by Jijo Mathew, a local expert provided by the manager of the Hornbill Camp at which I stayed. I also used it for rerefence after walks in the Erivakulam Rajamalai National Park and the Lake Periyar forest, and during three days spent on a boat on Kerala's backwaters. It's profusely illustrated and well indexed by family and species, making it relatively straightforward to identify what you've just seen. At over 400 grams in weight and almost A5 size (actually 215x135mm), it's not pocket-sized. I guess it would be difficult to cram so much information into anything smaller while keeping it legible but, because it added to the burden on my shoulder in the often humid and tiring environment of South Indian forests, I deducted a star!
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