Customer Reviews

Birds of the West Indies (Helm Identificatioon Guide)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just came back from St. Vincent where I used a copy of James Bond's "Birds of the Caribbean". It was acceptable, but it didn't have many colour plates or pictures of birds in flight.

This book is all colour illustrations and has pictures of birds in flight. The information is also up to date.

Many more useful tools for bird identification than in Bond! For example, this has habitat and maps of range.

This is an excellent field guide with great pictures of birds, making identification easier. The descriptions about the different bird species inhabiting the West Indies are also very good. The guide seems to give fuller coverage to birds in the northern Caribbean islands, such as Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, and somewhat less coverage to birds in the central and southern regions of the West Indian island chain, but it was still very helpful to me with bird identification on a recent trip to the island of Montserrat (about 300 miles southeast of Puerto Rico). Recommended for birders vacationing in the West Indies.

Though the previous A Guide To The Birds of The West Indies is unparalleled in its depth, this handy guide is what we were waiting for. It saves us the pains of lugging its bigger predecesor into swamps, jungles and fields, without sacrificing key information and wonderful drawings.

I used this guide in Februrary 2007 on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. Color illustrations were very good. But I missed the short behavioral cues that you find in Peterson's guides, like "scratches in leaves near road edges," "bobs head and swims half submerged."

St. John's has a Park Ranger-led walk on Francis Bay trail that was very productive.

Provides color plates for all species found in the West Indies, and helpful maps alongside the text, whenever necessary. All that you need for a field guide, at a reasonable price. It more than lives up to Princeton's reputation for fine guides,

Why is the One and Only?
The color Plates
The Cover and size
The Distribution Maps
The Basic and accurate Information
Do I mention the color plates?

Birds of the West Indies is a much needed and well researched update of the classic book "Birds of the West Indies" by James Bond. This update provides layman and serious birders and researchers with critically important updates on species distribution and habitat areas. A must read for the serious birders and curious readers interested in understanding the birds of the West Inidan Archipelago.

This is an excellent book. Very well laid out and easy to navigate. I purchased numerous books related to Birds of the West Indies and Caribbean from Amazon at the same time. My only mistake was inadvertently purchasing both the Hard Cover and Softcover versions of the same book. It is not readily apparent that they are the same. The Author is the tip off.

This would be a sufficient book if you were only going to buy one. It also comes with a little portable quick guide.

Much clearer and more up-to-date than The Birds of the West Indies (by James Bond) This book includes great full colour plates with lots of details.Descriptions are concise but very useful. I highly recommend this book to anyone birdwatching in the Caribbean.

I bought this guide to aid in identification of birds while travelling in the Lesser Antilles. It was useful, but there were a few birds that I photographed that either are not described in this book, or the variations in the birds I saw were so similar to several of the birds on the book that I could not make a positive indentication. Also, the textual information about each species is somewhat sparse compared to North American field guides.

It appears that more effort was made on the birds of the northern Caribbean islands than the southern islands, but all in all, this book is a good field guide and I am glad that I had taken it with me.

Marshall Faintich, author of "A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Wintergreen"