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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not good enough!, 6 May 1999
By A Customer
This book unfortunately fails to meet its aims. Why? It covers its subject matter in barely adequate depth, and contains many errors.Various people have reviewed it on internet birding discussion groups (especially birding-aus) and almost everyone said it wasn't up to scratch. By covering all of Australasia and Oceania it cannot hope to cover places in sufficient depth. Consider some of the comments made by Australian reviewers. One person familiar with the Cairns area listed several species that the book mentioned as being present which are either very rare vagrants or not present at all. Perhaps more importantly, the directions on how to get to sites are often vague, or downright inaccurate. Contact details for various people (eg boat tour operators) are sometimes several years out of date. The Australian section is like an abridged version of The Complete Guide to Finding the Birds of Australia by Richard and Sarah Thomas. The latter book, whilst itself containing some similar shortcomings, is far more likely to be of use to a visitor to Australia. Equally Doug Pratt's Enjoying Birds in Hawaii would be a better buy for someone going there. The book does contain site information about a number of places (especially Pacific islands) that is not readily available in other books. However one birder who has used the book in a number of south Pacific islands described it as "essentially worthless ... just a cobbling together of outdated trip reports and third hand descriptions of places he's probably never visited". This may sound harsh, but given the amount of money people spend to get to some of these places, buyers of this book are entitled to expect a higher standard of accuracy.
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by Andrew Paterson
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