Customer Reviews

Birds of Mexico and Central America

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very good guide for an area with an incredible array of species. Besides Costa Rica, none of the other Central American countries have a usable guide in the field so this could come in quite handy in Panama or Mexico for instance which have large, informative, but quite cumbersome guides of their own. This guide easily slips into your pocket and illustrates all the species you may see over a wide area. Range maps are also easy to reference based on the bird's number on a particular plate.

The illustrations in this guide are comparable to the Garrigues guide for Costa Rica, and in my opinion better than those in Stiles & Skutch- although they are smaller in this guide by Van Perlo and sometimes bunched up on the plate. The illustrations remind me a bit of the Sibley guide-sketchlike but proportionately very accurate.

I would give this five stars for fieldworthiness but way too many plates have birds whose names appear on a different page making it very hard to compare certain groups of birds. I don't know why they only went with 96 plates for this book when Birds of Western and Central Africa by the same company has 109 plates for fewer species.

This book contains the same material as the Princeton Illustrated Checklist for Birds of Mexico and Central America but has a nicer cover and cool glossy paper. If you are taking this book out of the home library and out into the field, I don't know if the glossy paper is a help or a hindrance :)

We used this book in Central America and at times found it difficult to match the picture to the right bird. Larger pictures would improve the book. More descriptive information would also help.

I concur with the previous reviewers thinking that the book deserves four stars overall, though it would deserve five for its compactness. Being compact is a major virtue in a field guide, and if one visits several countries of Central America, weight limits become all too often an important consideration. I have not used this book in the field yet, but I'm presently finding it most helpful in preparing an upcoming trip. Adding the missing pointers myself in many cases. And I still recall the times when I had no illustrated field guide for a two month visit of Costa Rica. There have been a number of books since, but this one is the most compact one if one wants to cover several countries of the area.

I gave this to my husband, the birdwatcher, as we are planning a trip to central America later. He is delighted. There are great illustrations.