An Excellent Guide for a Must-bird Region

Unique geographic coverage, outstanding illustrations, and first-class species information make this an excellent new field guide for one of the must-bird places on Earth.

In an era where a seemingly endless amount of information is available on our phones, we may wonder, “What is the future of bird books?” To be relevant in today’s world, books must be well executed and unique. Birds of Greater Southern Africa checks both boxes with a vengeance. If this is what the future looks like, bird books are here to stay.

Greater Southern Africa (GSA) is one of the most celebrated birding areas in the world. While it does not have the large number of species tropical South America does, it instead has three things going for it. First is the number of endemics (about 160); second is that most of the region is arid, making finding the birds relatively simple; and third is a vibrant birding community that keeps tabs on the avian comings and goings. Wonderful birds such as Cape and Damara rockjumpers, Cape and Gurney’s sugarbirds, Blue and Wattled cranes, Blue and Rüppell’s bustards, Southern Yellow-billed and Monteiro’s hornbills, Rockrunner, and White-tailed Shrike attract birders from around the world. Now, with this new book, we can equally dream of Inaccessible Island Rail, Grimwood’s Longclaw, and Chaplin’s Barbet.

In the past, birders tended to visit the Republic of South Africa, Namibia, or Botswana. As birders become more sophisticated, they are looking farther afield to places such as northern Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia. In addition, this book covers a range of islands in the southern oceans, from Tristan da Cunha and Gough in the southeast Atlantic to Amsterdam and Kerguelen in the southwest Indian Ocean.

That’s where this book comes into its own. In the 1960s, there was a two-volume handbook of the birds of the southern third of Africa. It covered all GSA and Angola. When I visited Zambia in the 1970s, there was a good book on the birds there, and in 1992, there was a tiny book that showed the Malawian birds that were not covered in a popular South African field guide. But since then there has been pretty much nothing. The birds were covered in the ambitious Birds of Africa South of the Sahara by Ian Sinclair and Peter Ryan, but Birds of Greater Southern Africa, a more focused tome, is significantly more useful. This book covers 1,198 species, including 26 “tricky-to-identify” birds that are to be expected in the region in the future. (Though they are good candidates for possible vagrants, one wonders why the distinctive Upland Sandpiper and Masked Shrike are considered tricky to ID.)

The Birds of Greater Southern Africa tries to be a pocket guide, as it is only 5.5 x 8.5 in. (14 x 21.5 cm). The thickness, however, betrays its dream, as at 640 pages and 2.4 lbs. (1.1 kg), it is just too bulky to fit into any but the biggest cargo pockets. The 36 pages of introduction are standard. I noticed one oddity in the table of contents: After 268 (excellent) plates, there are four “Appendix Plates.”

These comprise: 1) Southern Penguins, 2) Island Endemics I, 3) Island Endemics II, and 4) Atlantic Islands Finches. The table of contents, oddly, does not list the four appendix plates in the order in which they appear. For example, appendix plate three appears at four places in the table of contents because there are four different families of birds (ducks, sheathbills, terns, and thrushes) on the plate! But if you look for the third appendix plate at the end of the table of contents you will not find it, even though the plate is located at the end of the book.

On a positive note, the guide includes a wonderfully comprehensive analysis of “Landscapes, Topography, and Habitats.” The discussions are detailed and useful and will inform anyone who wishes to understand the relationship between the birds and their geography. The accounts are distilled from the book Habitats of Africa, which is co-authored by Keith Barnes, the senior author of this book. I hate to say it, but one aspect of the discussion that I love is the use of red human silhouettes to show the height of the vegetation in the habitat. 

The species accounts and maps are presented thoroughly, with detailed topological illustrations of the features of the birds. Two maps are used for the ranges: one of the continental GSA area and another incorporating the adjacent southern oceans. This works fine, though I would have preferred exploded maps that show the ranges of the many birds whose distributions are very local. Instead, they use arrows to pinpoint the occurrence of the local species on a big map. 

Every field guide lives or dies on the quality of the illustrations. Readers who have Terry Stevenson and John Fanshaw’s Birds of East Africa will recognize the plates and the styles of the main artists, John Gale and Brian Small, two of the very best illustrators. Their birds have a lifelike presence on the page that is not only pleasing to the eye but helps confirm identifications. Coming back to the matter of online vs. printed content, there is one big advantage of a printed field guide: it makes it much easier to compare similar species when they are all on the same page. While I enjoy the familiar, excellent paintings of Gale and Small, I am equally impressed with the work of Faansie Peacock, a talented South African artist and publisher who has been recruited to paint the larks, one of the most difficult-to-identify groups of birds in all of Africa. His larks are not only spot on, but they match the style of the two principal artists perfectly. While Peacock is well known in South Africa, I’m guessing this foray will cement his reputation as one of the world’s premier bird illustrators.

Though I am wowed by the quality of the illustrations, I have a few quibbles with some of the birds (of course!). One general trend that I find a little odd is that the birds seem to have oddly small heads. This is especially evident on the robins (plate 175) and the swallows (plate 156). I was a bit disappointed in the jaegers (plate 96), though there are other books that cover them comprehensively. As for quibbles about some individual paintings, the Red Knot (plate 90) is not pot-bellied enough, the Herero Chat (plate 180) should be more upright (perhaps they tried to fit it into a painting by putting it horizontally), and the Grey-headed Sparrows’ (plate 243) throats appear a bit too pale. But out of some 1200 species, these really are very few issues.

The species accounts are very helpful and discuss, using highlighted text, diagnostic field marks for identifying similar species. In several cases, such as with the spurfowls on plates 61, 62, and 65, and the seedeaters on plate 267, populations that either had been considered separate species, or that might be considered full species in the future, are illustrated and discussed. Ironically, on the same plate (267), the recently lumped Vincent’s Bunting is mentioned in the species account of Cape Bunting, but it is not illustrated.

After the species accounts are several useful appendices. The first four are plates that cover birds of the southern oceans and islands, including those in the South Atlantic. The next section is the “Vagrants Watchlist,” which lists and illustrates a couple dozen potential new species for GSA. Next are three checklists: one of the birds of the Southern-Ocean islands, one of the endemic birds of GSA, and one of globally threatened species found in GSA. The last substantive appendix is a series of maps showing the important bird areas of each country and the Southern-Ocean islands. Finally, there is a list of additional reading, and two good indices.

This book is an outstanding addition to the bird books of southern Africa and will delight armchair birders by highlighting previously understudied birds of adjacent countries and the Southern Ocean islands.