The Australian Bird Guide - Best Purchase I’ve Made in the Last Year

The Australian Bird Guide

This is a book I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, along with the 2 other guidebooks (a reptile and a mammals guide) that have been our companions on our Australian camping/road trips.

The Bird Guide though, is without doubt, hands down my favourite, most used, and most useful purchase of the last year.

Coming across it

I bought it at the Tourist Office in Quorn, South Australia on our first camping sojourn. We saw so many birds while hiking in Alligator Gorge, and in the Mount Remarkable area more generally, and then in Wilmington that I really really felt I needed a book to be able to work out what we had seen, how common these birds were, their range and habitats, how to identify them and just anything else I could find out. All things good guidebooks are great for.

The book jumped out at me while I was looking through the books at the Tourist Office (as I usually do anywhere there are book). I wasn’t really expecting to find anything this good and comprehensive there, but I figured I might find a local guidebook or pocket guide.

Comprehensive

From opening it and reading the ‘area and species covered’ section quickly, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Covering not only birds on the mainland and vagrant/migratory birds, this book also covers all of Australia’s offshore territories (like Christmas Island), except the Australian Antarctic Territory. I was stoked, and just had to get it.

I have not been disappointed. It was $50 well spent - I believe it is cheaper online.

Recent

It is recent, written and published in 2017, it is fairly recent and won the 2018 Australian Book Industry Award’s Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year. The version I have is the revised edition from 2019, which was reprinted in 2020 with corrections, so, very recent.

Gorgeous Illustrations

The illustrations in this book are just delightful. It is impressive that the publishers were able to get three illustrators (Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack and Kim Franklin) to illustrate the book and yet, it looks so cohesive from one page to the next.

The illustrations are what really makes the book for me. Just flipping through the pages for fun is a real joy, but the process of finding and poring over the details of a bird I’ve just seen is satisfying on a whole other level.

Useful Area/Distribution Maps

These are also lovely, and of course the book comes with a caveat that ranges are changing, and in many cases reducing.

Still, the maps provided are a lovely, useful way to see at a glance where each creature is expected to be seen. Together with the rarity scale, it is easy to use very quickly and helps narrow down the range of possible options if you’re not sure what you’re looking for.

Fun, Visual Front Reference ‘Table’

The ‘Table of Contents’ provided are two-fold. There is a ‘Visual quick reference to bird groups’ and an ‘Alphabetical quick reference to bird groups’.

The former is a lot of fun to look at as you can easily navigate through the book based on visual shape and features of the bird(s) you might have seen. Odds are, just by looking at this little quick reference, you’ll find what you’re looking for and be able to go to the pages they’re on quickly.

Beyond a reference feature, I enjoy it because it is a gorgeous visual representation of the various different types of birds in Australia and how wonderfully diverse their features are. These two pages (the inside cover) make me smile every time I look at them.

It has become indispensable for me

Whether camping or just on a day trip or walking along a city street or sitting at home, I use this every single time we’ve seen an unfamiliar to us bird. I also use it often when sketching, to remind myself about the birds I’m sketching.

In fact I know I love it so much because it physically hurt when I realised I’d forgotten to bring it on our recent 3-day trip to Kakadu National Park a couple of weeks ago. I missed it every single day, and Scott also asked for it a couple of times.

I don’t know of a single other book I’ve missed in this way before - other than the few times I forgot to bring my sketching kit and saw something I’d have liked to sketch.

It is such a wonderful, useful and joyful resource to look at. I’m sure it will keep on giving, and will in turn be showered with a lot more love from us while we’re in Australia.