East African Wildlife (Bradt Travel Guide) [Paperback]

Philip Briggs (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bradt Travel Guide | Publication Date: February 26, 2008

The wildlife of east Africa is the major attraction for visitors to this region, with the legendary game reserves of Serengeti and the Maasai Mara. This new visitor's guide provides a colorful overview of the region’s variety of large mammals together with an insight into their habits and habitats. The book also provides an excellent introduction to the region’s less heralded variety of ‘small stuff’ – including1,500 bird species and butterflies.
Accessible and beautifully illustrated, the guide will appeal both to the first-time visitor and to the serious naturalist seeking a compact volume to carry around. It will also make a great souvenir after the trip.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'A handy beginner's manual to the region's varied creatures.' Wanderlust 'Bradt Travel Guides simply have the best wildlife coverage of any of the popular guide books.' BBC Wildlife '...a handy one-stop handbook to the region's fauna.' Travel Africa

About the Author

Johannesburg resident Philip Briggs has travelled extensively throughout Africa and is author of Bradt’s Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Northern Tanzania, Tanzania, and co-author of Mozambique and Rwanda.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides; 1st edition (February 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841622087
• ISBN-13: 978-1841622088
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #236,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

African travel specialist Philip Briggs has been exploring the highways, byways and backwaters of the world's most challenging and exciting continent since 1986, when he spent several months backpacking on a shoestring from Nairobi to Cape Town. In 1991, he wrote the Bradt Guide to South Africa, the first such guidebook to be published internationally after the release of Nelson Mandela.

Over the rest of the 1990s, Philip wrote a series of pioneering Bradt Guides to destinations that were then - and in some cases still are - otherwise practically uncharted by the travel publishing industry. These included the first dedicated guidebooks to Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana and Rwanda (co-authored with Janice Booth), all of which are now in their 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th edition.

Philip has visited more than two dozen African countries, and written about most of them, whether it be for guidebook publishers such as AA, APA-Insight, Berlitz, Camerapix, Dorling Kindersley, Frommers, Struik-New Holland and 30 Degrees South, or for specialist travel and wildlife magazines including Africa Birds & Birding, Africa Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Travel Africa and Wanderlust.

He still spends at least four months on the road every year, and spends his rest of the time battering away at a keyboard in the sleepy dorp of Bergville, in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region of South Africa. He is married to the travel photographer Ariadne Van Zandbergen and lives with three dogs and a cat. When not obssessing over some or other aspect of African history, culture, wildlife or travel, Philip's interests include music, reading and walking.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good balance between pictures and informative text, August 28, 2009

By 

Enjolras (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: East African Wildlife (Bradt Travel Guide) (Paperback)

Too many wildlife guidebooks simply display pictures of each species and identifying information. This Bradt's guide is a nice improvement over other books in that I found the text genuinely informative. The book covers birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians by family, with the natural history of each family or species. It goes into the evolution of certain groups and provides interesting insights into the behavior of some of the more famous animals. Indeed, the text reads more easily than most other guidebooks. My wife found herself reading this book during our long drives to different parks and enjoying it immensely.

Note: you might want another more traditional guidebook to help you identify species in the field (I liked Wildlife of East Africa (Princeton Illustrated Checklists)). The Bradt's guide had good pictures, but for some of the less popular animals it might not have enough to help with identification. In particular, Bradt's guide doesn't cover birds in the detail birders might wish (try The Birds of East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi (Princeton Field Guides) for birds). However, I think any safari would benefit by combining these books with Bradt's to really understand the wildlife you'll see on safari.