Customer Reviews

Field Guide to the Birds of Australia (Helm Field Guides)

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A large size and scale reference work about the avian life of our country. It does also include a section about the blow-ins and transients that appear from time to time, so that is helpful. Broken down by family, this reference book is an excellent guide, and has worked for me many times. Well worth it.

I haven't had a chance to use this guide in the field yet (unfortunately...) but the book looks excellent. The format of this guide is standard: birds are drawn in color full-page tables while maps and descriptive features to help identification are presented separately. The artwork is very good, although not as outstanding as, say, Jonsson or Svensson et al's Birds of Europe.

Something useful to keep in mind is that this volume is the very same field guide (and the same edition, the 7th) published by the same two authors as a Princeton Field Guide. Apparently the Princeton guide has become a collector's item and at time of writing this review it sells for $400 or more. If you don't care about the publisher but you are just looking for a very good field guide to the birds of Australia, I would definitely purchase the Helm edition, which you can purchase from several booksellers via Amazon. Just keep in mind that most copies will ship from the UK, so you will likely receive the book in a couple of weeks (so don't order it a week before your one-in-a-lifetime trip to Australia!!!).