Bird of Melanesia (Bismarcks, Solomons, Vanuatu and New Caledonia)

Another familiar style field guide from the Helm stable, this one to the plethora of Pacific islands to the north east of Australia, home to the famous Kagu, beloved of wildlife film makers and the front cover ‘star’ of the book. This is a surprisingly sizeable field guide, almost 500 pages, meaning only keen birders would consider packing it. Arranged with (excellent) illustrations with brief description at the front and the main part of the text in the second half of the book. There are no distribution maps, which would be fairly meaningless, but each species has very useful ‘at a glance’ series of boxes, each representing an island group, and the fill immediately tells you which groups the bird is found on, and what their status is – much easier to use than for me to describe!

There is an introductory section on habitats and several pages of maps of all the islands, which whilst interesting are perhaps not strictly necessary for a field guide. In addition, surprisingly, despite the effective identifier of which islands each bird is found on, many of the passerine illustrations are repeated (sometimes on several pages) as they are presented in taxonomic order and in an island group by island group way so, for instance, the Pacific Swallow illustration is repeated on six different pages. Bulk is the only downside to this guide, however.
 

Book reviewed by Su Gough