Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Birds of Armenia

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Basics: 1997, hardcover, 220 pages, 61 color plates, 346 species, range maps for each bird

This is a marvelous gem of a book. It covers all the birds of Armenia, a tiny country the size of Maryland found at the eastern border of Turkey. The highlight of this book is its plates.

The illustrations are very nicely done, with good color, detail, and postures. Nearly all of the relevant birds have multiple illustrations to show the gender plumages. These illustrations are certainly good enough to aid you with identification, as I experienced when looking at the wheatears and wagtails in the field.

It's a good thing the plates are done with quality because they help to compensate for one of the book's weaknesses which is the lesser amount of text. Although most of what is provided in the descriptions is decent, they are often a bit too brief. The material lacks sufficient information to help with the more difficult groups of birds such as the warblers. But, to be fair to the book, the descriptions do a better job with the wagtails.

Because this book was intended to be a field guide, I would recommend dropping the generic descriptions of the nest, eggs, and food in place of more descriptive information on the bird's identification. This natural history information is available in the author's other more expanded handbook for Armenia. Or, perhaps more pages could have been added to the book to help expand the material. Adding as much as 20-30 pages would still have kept this thinner field guide to a respectable and acceptable field guide size.

The maps at the end of the book are larger than usual and offer very good detail with cities, rivers, and four different colors. As a twist to range maps, the colors do not represent seasonal aspects, but relative abundance. The four categories are common, uncommon, rare, and possible but undocumented. One other unique and admirable feature of these maps is that each appears to have been individually crafted for the bird. As the colored ranges change between the different species, the names of the nearby towns also change to offer more specific detail. I've never seen so much attention go into making species-specific range maps.

One quirk in this book caught my eye but it took a moment to realize what I was seeing. There is relatively little blank space on any of the pages with text regardless of how many species are discussed. Instead of filling in more information or, merely showing blank white space, the font size of the text has been s scaled up or down to make each page appear to be equally full. This is really no big deal. It simple made me chuckle once I figured out what I was seeing.

This book alone will probably be sufficient for your birding travels to Armenia. It would also be very helpful in the surrounding countries of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and eastern Turkey. Just as standard procedure, I recommend taking one of the European guides to help supplement the text of this book. -- (written by Jack, shown with sample pages at Avian Review, July 2008)

I've listed several related books below...
1) Handbook of the Birds of Armenia by Adamian/Klem
2) Raptors and Owls of Georgia by Galvez
3) The Birds of Turkey by Kirwan
4) Songbirds of Turkey by Roselaar
5) The Birds of Azerbaijan by Patrikeev
6) Birds of Europe with North Africa and the Middle East by Jonsson
7) Birds of Europe by Mullarney et al.
8) Field Guide to the Birds of the Middle East by Porter et.al.
9) Birds of the Middle East and North Africa: A Companion Guide by Hollom et.al.
10) Birds of Fauna of Ukraine: The Field Guide by Fesenko (ISBN 966771022X)