Birds of Costa Rica (Helm Field Guides)

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A state-of-the-art illustrated field guide to the birds of Costa Rica Costa Rica is among the most popular birding destinations in the world, with a breathtaking diversity of neotropical birdlife and stunningly beautiful habitats ranging from shady mangrove swamps to mist-enshrouded mountaintops and verdant rain forests. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Further space is saved by not covering 27 pelagic seabirds that you are very unlikely to see anyway. Dale Dyer is an acclaimed bird illustrator and a field associate at the American Museum of Natural History.

Inevitably these details leave the reader wanting more, and saddened that this concise guide is space limited (Why and how does the Great Kiskadee taste foul? Unlike many bird guides, some natural history details of the birds are teased in the text, giving greater ecological depth to the accounts. In April 2000, he published the first quarterly online Gone Birding Newsletter and has been keeping readers up-to-date on rare bird sightings, new distributional records, and other pertinent local birding news ever since. Where taxonomic ambiguity exists, they helpfully include alternate species names in parentheses and uncertain labels or proposed splits in brackets, while providing evidence for the changes in the appendices. This is exactly the focus of The Birds of Costa Rica – to assist with identification in the field – and the book succeeds admirably.Costa Rica supports eight endemic bird species (although three of them are only on the rarely visited Cocos island, some 330 miles away by boat). Species’ distribution maps are quite generalized but including San José and gridlines on each map improves interpretability. The biogeography section includes brief descriptions of the wide variety of habitats found in Costa Rica along with a collection of 20 color photographs depicting how they appear on the ground.

This new field identification guide to the birds of Costa Rica is a natural result of his birding and writing experience.The authors have used all of that knowledge to produce an excellent, lightweight guide that will undoubtedly become the go-to guide for visitors to this wonderful country. It covers all regularly occurring bird species found in the region and features facing-page plates and text that make field identification easy. These include Blue-throated Toucanet (part of Emerald Toucanet), Flammulated Atilla (with Bright-rumped Attila), Whistling Wren (with Southern Nightingale Wren), Canebrake Wren (with Plain Wren) and Northern Violaceous Trogon (with Violaceous Trogon). Unfortunately these do not indicate whether a species is a resident or migrant, but this is a considerable advance on Stiles and Skutch which had no maps and gave range descriptions which required a good knowledge of the country. The book does include an index of English names, but unfortunately does not contain a corresponding index of scientific names, or a complete list of birds of Costa Rica organized by taxonomic family.