Customer Reviews

Birds of British Columbia: Passerines : Flycatchers Through Vireos

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This is actually a review of the entire four volume set that is The Birds of British Columbia. Clearly not restrained by limitations on space, the authors drone on endlessly. Finding useful information is like sifting river sand for gold flakes. It's there but requires a lot of work to accumulate. There are innumerable graphs, but these are just information blotted onto the pages without interpretation. One could easily get the idea that Mountain Bluebirds, for instance, are nearly as common on the south coast (where rare) as the interior (where common). Why? Because the graphs show total number of sightings, not adjusted for the overall effort (which is much higher in the populous areas around Vancouver and Victoria. The noteworthy sighting section often contains many sightings that leave me scratching my head as to why they are noteworthy. Pictures often seem included just because an author happened to have them on hand. There are lots of photos of bluebirds or phoebes nesting in manmade sites yet precious few photos of the birds themselves.

Rather than presenting every bit of data obtained, relatively unedited and undeciphered, the authors should have condensed the information into compact statements that focus on important points of status and distribution in British Columbia. The reader is left to do so on his/her own, which is at times is frankly impossible. Making all of this more onerous is the enormous size of the 4 volumes and the concurrent enormous expense.

If you can afford this wonderful book and you already own the previous three in this series, it's a must have.
Even if you've just started with a cheap small bird book and you've not yet reached the obsessive stage, this will undoubtedly show you the way, if not drive you all the way there. It provides everything you'll want to know about BC birds, and is very hard to put down, even though it's HUGE and heavy.
My husband had bought the first three in the series as soon as they were published, and now he has died, I was compelled to complete the set just for his sake. But I'm very glad I did because it has opened a new world for me.