10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an essential guide for bird and nature lovers, 2 July 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (Helm Field Guides) (Hardcover)
This guide by Richard Ffrench is the only comprehensive guide available to the bird life on the sister islands. It is well written, easy to understand and has a good collection of colour plates. The book is essential for any serious birder and for any nature lover wishing to identify some of the hundreds of species of birds you are sure to see on Trinidad and Tobago. If you are looking for a less comprehensive, light weight guide try Ffrench's "Birds of Trinidad and Tobago".
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
T&T birder's bible, 15 Oct 2002
This review is from: A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (Helm Field Guides) (Hardcover)
An excellent field guide to Trinidad & Tobago's avifauna, the ffrench has been around long enough, & loved well enough, in its various editions, to be considered a classic of its kind. I've used it everywhere from Port of Spain's Botanical Gardens to the forests of the Northern Range to the Pointe-a-Pierre Wildfowl Trust to my own back garden & never failed to identify the specimen in question (& I am no more than an enthusiatic amateur). This book, for me, is the model of a natural history field guide.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointment to use in the field!, 22 Oct 2004
Unfortunately this book doesn't live up to its potential.
The most obvious shortfall is a lamentable lack of colour plates. This has been well documented in other reviews, but it really does restrict use in the field.
Imagine the scenario. You are wandering along a beach somewhere in Tobago, and you see what is obviosly a member of the tanager family, so you refer to this volume. There is no illustration of the bird you are looking at, so you have to refer to the text. You go for the most obvious entry, only to find a description along the lines of 'very similar to species a) with the exception of...', so you refer to species a), only to find no correlation with the bird in front of you. By the time you've finished this process the bird has returned to it's summer feeding grounds in Costa Rica and your chances have gone.
Sorry to be so negative, but I've recently attempted this very exercise, with immense frustration. I still have several photographs that I'm unable to positively identify with the aid of this book.
Other reviewers have criticised the plates, but lauded the text. I would criticise even the text. Since when has a Southern Lapwing had a black bill? (no plate available for comparison).
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