The Essential Tool for Birding Australia

A review by Chris Benesh

The Australian Bird Guide, by Peter Menkhorst, Danny Rogers, Rohan Clarke, Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack, and Kim Franklin

Princeton University Press, 2017

566 pages—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14737

Few places on Earth are as well saturated with field guides as Australia. The first modern attempt , Neville Cayley’s pioneering What Bird Is That?, published in 1931, was followed forty years later by Peter Slater’s two-volume Field Guide to Australian Birds, which set the standard until the mid-1980s. Since then, guides by Slater, Pizzey, Simpson, and Morcombe have dominated the market in turn, most of them appearing in several revised editions over the years.

In spite of the advances shown by each, all of those titles have also had significant shortcomings, in illustrations, in layout, or in content. Now, though, after years of work by several of Australia’s most talented birders, The Australian Bird Guide ushers in a new era.

One thing immediately apparent is the high quality of the new guide’s illustrations. The layout, modeled on the gold standard set by Svennsson, Mullarney, and Zetterström’s Birds of Europe (published in the UK as the Collins Bird Guide), will be familiar to anyone who has used that book: The birds are depicted on the recto page in standardized positions, facilitating quick comparison of similar or related species; the illustrations are annotated with terse comments about identification. Range maps are placed at the lower edge of the verso page, below the prose species accounts.

The guide’s clear organization extends to its introductory sections on mapping and distribution, bird identification, molt, and topography. Any birder who has been paying attention knows that we are in a period of great upheaval in the arrangement of higher-level taxa— orders, families and genera—and of considerable disagreement about species limits. The authors circumvent these problems by choosing utility over taxonomy. They arrange the plates “pragmatically,” by biome (marine, freshwater, and terrestrial), then adopt a taxonomic sequence within each grouping. Seven pages of the front matter tackle the subject of taxonomy in an Australian context, and a complete checklist, following Version 5.4 (2015) of the IOC World Bird List, is found in the back matter.

There have long been two distinct taxonomic authorities in Australia, one led by Les Christidis and Walter E. Boles, the other by Richard Schodde and Ian J. Mason. Christidis and Boles rely heavily on modern genetic studies in their taxonomic decisions, while Schodde and Mason have depended more on morphologic comparisons. These two bodies have reached different conclusions in some cases, and the resulting uncertainty in species limits has sometimes stirred great debate in the Australian birding community. The Australian Bird Guide follows an eclectic blend of these two authorities.

The Australian Bird Guide has chosen to maintain the Lesser Sooty Owl as distinct from the Sooty Owl, the Morepork as distinct from the Southern Boobook, and the Tasmanian Scrubwren as distinct from White-browed. It splits the Naretha Blue Bonnet from the Blue Bonnet and recognizes both Eastern and Western Ground Parrots. The Gilbert’s Honeyeater makes it in, despite being a very recent split from White-naped Honeyeater, as does the Kimberly Honeyeater, split from the White-lined Honeyeater. The authors resurrect seven species of quail-thrushes; this is the first major guide to illustrate an as yet undescribed Atherton Tableland form of the Spotted Quail-thrush. The Silver-backed Butcherbird of northern Australia, sometimes considered a subspecies of the Gray, is treated here as a full species. Green and Spotted Catbirds are maintained as full species. The Paperbark Flycatcher is considered distinct from the Restless. A female of the recently described, cryptic Western Whistler is illustrated; this was formerly considered conspecific with the Golden Whistler.

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