H. Douglas Pratt

To the point, I really like this book. Outside a few of the accidental or extreme rarities, all of Palau’s birds are covered in this book – along with the 2 indigenous species of bats. In addition to offering excellent, abundant photos, the book easily demonstrates the authors’ passions for Palau. They’ve created various nuances of how the book is designed and have included unique cultural, yet bird-related features. I chuckled at the touch of using a tropicbird as the directional pointer of a compass, indicating north in the maps.

This book is a combination of field, photo, and natural history guides. Its design is not that of a typical identification guide; however, it can certainly be used as one due to the limited number of birds on Palau and the few look-alike species present (if we ignore the transient shorebirds).

All of the resident or common birds are shown in multiple photographs, with the endemic species receiving special attention with up to 15 photos. Nearly all of the glossy pictures are very good. The selection of photos places focus on exhibiting the bird in its natural environment and behaviors. In addition to a typical perched pose, other shots show the bird in flight, foraging, fishing, feeding young, or marauding an intruder. Most of the breeders also have the eggs and/or nest shown. The same quality of photos (14) is given for the bats.

The text for each bird varies with the bird’s presence on the islands. Transient shorebirds receive 1-2 paragraphs that focus mainly on describing the bird. Other more frequent birds can receive up to a page of information that covers descriptions, voice, habits and behavior, feeding, ranges, populations, and other natural history material. The 12 endemic species receive the greatest coverage in material, depth, and detail. This information is very welcome for a region that has comparatively little ornithological knowledge available. The endemics are also illustrated in two top-quality plates (pp 26-27). I wish these same plates could be extended to cover all of Palau’s birds.

Up-to-date taxonomical information is included and addresses potential or proposed species splits between the various islands in the region.

The first 28 pages of the book offer a great introduction to Palau, to the geography and environments of individual island groups, to the island culture, and provide several aerial photos of the islands with labeled maps layered on top. The margins of the pages are adorned with photos of islanders, art, and postage stamps featuring birds or bats.

At first pass, this book will look rather busy, if not a little jumbled. This is due to the many photos, to their wide variety of sizes, and to how they’re laid out across the pages with the accompanying text. However, after spending more time in this book, this is welcomed because of what it all represents, which is an incredible source of information on such a small area of the Pacific. You will not find any other book that comes remotely close to what this book offers in both material and photos.

I’ve listed several related books below…
1) A Field Guide to the Birds of the Yap Island by Clements
2) A Field Guide to the Birds of Hawaii and the Tropical Pacific by Pratt
3) Birds of the Solomons, Vanuatu & New Caledonia by Doughty
4) Guide to Birds of Vanuatu by Bregulla
5) Birds of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa by Watling
6) Birds of the Fiji Bush by Clunie
7) South Pacific Birds by DuPont
8) Oiseaux de Nouvelle Caledonie et des Loyautes: Tome I & II by Hannecart
9) Birds of the North Solomons by Hadden
10) The Birds of Northern Melanesia by Mayr
11) The Birds and Birdlore of Samoa by Muse… (meer)

As the name suggests this guide covers Hawaii and the tropical Pacific -- the northernmost Hawaiian islands, extending north of the Tropic of Cancer, and a handful of Polynesian islands straggling south of the Tropic of Capricorn are the only exceptions. It thus includes, in its own words, "tropical Polynesia, Fiji, and Micronesia". Easter Island is excluded (probably because it's covered by Chilean guides, and it's not tropical anyway), despite the fact that it would add only about four species.

There is a lot of useful ancillary information, such as a description of island habitats (many of which are likely to be unfamiliar to non-tropical birders, like the "lowland dry forest" and "mamane forest" of Hawaii.) There are also two pages in the back of color photos of relevant plants (one of Hawaiian plants, one covering the rest of the Pacific), again useful for non-tropical birders like me who can recognize a pine tree when looking for crossbills but not an ohia tree when looking for honeycreepers. There are also six separate checklists for different island groups, with each of those further broken down by island. The maps of the island groups aren't directly useful, but it's nice to see the islands as more than just as list of disconnected names, and they could aid in the identification of potential vagrants.

The bulk of the book -- nearly 300 pages -- is devoted to the species accounts. These are in taxonomic order. They're quite detailed and include every species of bird reliably documented in the tropical Pacific, including those which haven't been seen since Captain Cook's voyage and are certainly long extinct. There isn't any noticeable North American bias in which rarely occuring birds are illustrated -- the book is just as likely to refer you to an Australian or Eurasian guide as a North American one for rare stragglers.

Illustrations, showing only birds which occur more regularly or which went extinct (or, rather, were thought to go extinct) a short enough time ago that they may still persist, are separate from the species accounts, and ordered sensibly, albeit inconsistently -- seabirds, shorebirds, and other widespread non-passerines are in taxonomic order, while the more geographically limited passerines are separated by island group, to minimize both duplicate illustrations and birds from different islands appearing together. Introduced birds are also illustrated all in a group. There is still some duplication, but not as much as if the authors had pictured White-tailed Tropicbird (or House Sparrow, for that matter) separately for every island group where it occurs.

The illustrations are clear and show male, female, and juvenile plumages when different, as well as showing geographic variation. The illustration style is strongly reminiscent of the NGS guide. This isn't surprising, since Pratt (who illustrated this volume) was a contributing artist to the NGS guide as well. There are a number of extinct birds illustrated -- personally, I'd prefer that they were left out and the remaining illustrations enlarged, though I can see the arguments in favor (that there still could be a few hiding out -- several species have been rediscovered, some after decades). At least they could have given a clear visual indicator, such as a differently-colored background, to show that a species is thought to be extinct. There are no distribution maps; almost all of the islands are small enough that naming the island and the habitat are adequate, and when this is not the case the region is described in the text (e.g. the Hawaiian Crow: "higher slopes of Mauna Loa above Kealakekua Bay".)

Field marks are not pointed out on the illustrations, and flipping between plates and text is necessary (though each indicates the page number of the other, making that pretty painless). My main quibble is that distribution isn't indicated on the illustration pages for the more widespread birds (the seabirds etc.), which I suspect will necessitate a lot of flipping pages. It may just be my impression, but it seems that birds with a global distribution, such as shorebirds, are not covered as well for identification purposes as birds limited to the tropical Pacific. This does make sense, but means that if you really want to be sure you can identify migrating shorebirds in the area you'd need another book.… (meer)