Customer Reviews

A Guide to the Birds of Panama: With Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ridgely's guide is the best - and really the only - available field guide covering all the species of birds in the nation of Panama. While it is useful and serves most purposes, it has been over a decade since the second edition was released, and it is more than due for an overhaul and expansion. The most necessary would be the addition of range maps, that would make the book infinitely more useful in planning a trip. At the very least, there should be a single, detailed map of Panama, indicating the locations mentioned in the range descriptions! Also, it would be better to limit the scope of the book entirely to Panama, as Costa Rica and other areas to the north are covered by other guides, and the pertinent information for those areas in this book are scant, at best. Then, the isolated plates in the back need to be intergrated, as do the plates of Darien specialties, etc. Many species have been recently added to the Panama list, or split, etc, and those species need to be added. But, all this aside, this book should enable the identification of most Panama birds, and remains an indispensible resource for any birder traveling to that country.

This is a good, standard guidebook with beautiful bird plates. It is, however, somewhat awkward to have the plates divided into two groups at different places in the book. Three chapters ("Migration and Local Movements", Recent Developments...", and "Finding Birds in Panama") were especially interesting and helpful. The chapter "Finding Birds in Panama" was very accurate and useful to me. I wish I had purchased this guidebook before my earlier birding trips to Costa Rica. It is an important book for the entire region.

I visit Panama at least once a year, and this book is the first thing I pack for every trip. There's simply no other field guide out there. Although the book is over due for a thorough update (of both taxonomy and range reports), it's still the best source for identifying birds in Panama. All the guides and researchers that I've met over the years use this book. One of the most useful parts is the section that describes the best birding spots in Panama, as most of these places have remained largely unchanged. The plates are very good, more than adequate.
The book's a bit on the heavy side though. I usually go out birding for an entire day (6 am to 6 pm) carrying water, food, a camera and heavy telephoto lens, a tripod and binoculars. Even so, I've always resisted cutting out the plates, and end up taking the whole thing with me into the jungle. If the publisher were to make available a separate smaller booklet with only the plates, I'd definitely buy it. My back would be very grateful indeed!
Conclusion: If you're planning a birdwatching trip to Panama, you NEED this book!

The text in this book is excellent, with good descriptions of the various species and nice writeups of behavioral habits. However if you want to use the book as a field guide to identify the birds you are seeing, there are some flaws that make this hard to do:

1. Not all birds are represented in the color plates. None of the 15 swift species, for example, get an entry on the plates.
2. Some birds have no picture at all, not even a black and white line drawing in the text. Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture, for example.
3. The index is incomplete. Try finding a saltator in the index.
4. There are two sets of plates. Most birds are in the first set, but there is a seemingly arbitrary set of birds relegated to "additional" plates near the back of the book. This makes it hard to do the tried and true method of scanning plates to help you quickly identify the bird you just saw.

So as a field guide this book probably merits only 3 stars. But to be fair it's not labeled as a field guide, but rather a "Guide to the Birds of Panama." Given the high quality of the text, it fills that role nicely.

It remains the only guide specific to the birds of Panama so a birder headed to that country has almost no choice but to buy a copy. However, this is a 1989 update to a work originally completed in 1974 and it is sorely lacking many features that are incorporated into the "modern" field guides published in the last decade.

Significant problems with this book that hopefully a future Panama bird guide will address:
1) There are no range maps showing the distribution of species in Panama. There is a text description of the range for each bird, but this is vastly inferior to a map, especially for someone who is visiting Panama.
2) Immature birds are not illustrated, and females are poorly illustrated: often with just a drawing of the head. The coverage for the Euphonias is especially poor with no illustration of the commonly encountered immature male Thick-billed Euphonia (looks like the female, but with the black mask and yellow head spot of the adult male), and only a head illustration for the male Tawny-capped Euphonia without any illustration of the female Tawny-capped Euphonia to assist in distinguishing it from the similar (illustrated) female Fulvous-vented Euphonia. Female hummingbirds are also mostly absent, or only shown with an illustration of the head.
3) The paperback version has an extremely heavy binding and is too heavy for all but the most athletic birders to take into the field. I saw many people who had resorted to cutting the illustrative plates out of the book, binding those, and carrying that into the field. If you are planning to stay at any hotel billing itself as a birdwatching site then you don't even need to bring this book with you to Panama as you will be better served browsing a hotel copy at the end of your day. The book is more useful as a reference work before and after your trip to Panama.
4) A minor complaint, but given that almost all groups of birders in Panama include native Spanish speakers it would be helpful to have the common Spanish bird names included in the text along with the already included common English and scientific names.

As other reviewers have noted, the text here is generally good, if a bit dated. I'm certain that there's more information on behavior, vocalizations, etc., than there were 2 decades ago when the latest edition was published, and it would be quite helpful to have this information included. Also, visual range maps, rather than textual descriptions of a bird's range, would be much quicker and easier to use.

However, I found the illustrations to be inadequate, for a number of reasons:
-Many species are illustrated only partially (head-only). Many species have only one sex or age class illustrated, even when there are large differences between sexes/age classes.
-Hawks in flight are illustrated on a pair of grainy, black-and-white pages which exclude many common species (Yellow-headed Caracara, which has a quite unique flight pattern, but was maddeningly difficult to identify with this book).
-Most frustrating were the "editorial notes" in the text accompanying the illustrations. For example, along with the illustration of Baird's Trogon was the note: "Belly of both sexes should be less orangey." There seemed to be one of these notes on every other plate in the book.

When you go to the effort of lugging around a 500+ page field guide, you want the illustrations to be exacting, and help with identification of birds that you weren't able to see under perfect conditions. However, I had difficulty identifying some species that I got quite good looks at - the illustrations often just don't match up with the reality of the bird. Unfortunately, this is the only guide that covers Panama in its entirety. If you're planning to travel extensively in Panama, this still might be the best book for you. However, if you're only traveling to western Panama, one of the good Costa Rican field guides (The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide, A Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica (Comstock Book)) would be preferable. Likewise, the excellent A Guide to the Birds of Colombia might be appropriate for those traveling only to eastern Panama.

A wonderful book, with full descriptions and habitats of birds, and excellent color plates. Also includes a checkoff table for birdwatchers.

I would recommend that anyone interested in the birds of Panama buy this book, however it is not the only book available about the birds of Panama. There is the Guia de Las Aves de Panama by Ridgely and Gawynne (ISBN 958-95245-0-8) and An Illustrated Field Guide to the Birds of Panama by Ponce y Muschett (ISBN 84-89127-76-X). It is best to have as much information as possible before a trip even if all these books have their shortcomings. Robert B Gillies, Volcan, Chiriqui, The Republic of Panama.

This book apparently is the best bird guide they have for Panama but it falls short of ideal. Firstly, not all the birds of Panama are illustrated. So if you are new to the birds of that area it is best you familiarize yourself with the text and know what to expect even if you are not sure what it looks like. Your best bet however is to get someone to assist you. When i visited for the first time i went to [...] for a local guide. The second downfall of this book is that the illustrations that are there are poorly done at best. I am used to the Birds of the West Indies (Princeton Field Guides) by Raffaele and that book is well illustrated. The third thing about this book is that it is not a hard cover. The number of species in Panama is so great one should not think of saving weight by printing an inch and a half thick book and wrap it with paper cover. Since it is going to be thick anyway, might as well give it a durable cover. The fact that the text is on different pages from the illustrations makes it particularly difficult to ID a bird. But, in the end, this is the best field guide that Panama has to offer so take it with a glass of water.

As stupid as this may sound, my biggest issue with this book was the weight. On a recent trip to Panama, I felt like every time I took the book with me I was hefting a four or five pound weight. It was difficult to juggle the book with binoculars, notebook etc on the trails.

My second issue is a personal one. I prefer bird books with the picture of the bird next to the description and range of territory as it allows me to rule out certain birds immediately upon viewing them. Our trip leader suggested I rip out the pages featuring the pictures of the birds and take those with me to help with the weight problem and to quickly zoom in on what I think I saw. I was like--I just paid about $35 for this book--no way!

I found some trifolds specifically for birdwatchers at one of the gift shops at one of the hotels we stayed at. They were just as useful as this tome. Although I am an avid bird watcher, this trip was kind of last minute so I did not have time to thoroughly study the guide. It did not contain range maps and from Internet searches I could tell the information hadn't been updated in awhile. The three trifolds (Birds of Central Panama, Birds of Eastern Panama and birds of Western Panama)ended up serving me as well as the book would have during the ten day trip--no time for in depth birding!

There is a new birding book for Panama coming out in December. It will be interesting to see that one if I go back. I did end up gifting Birds of Panama to our tour guide! This made him very happy and I was happy not to have to carry home the book (which by the way weighed more than the three pounds that Amazon states it weighs--more like four or five).