Birds of Southern India (Grimmet R and Inskipp T, Helm Field Guides 2005)

I get out to India with my airline job a couple of times a year but have actually spent very little time in the field in recent years, and a trip to Kolkata made me realise just how long it had been since I’d birded the subcontinent - for once I didn’t have a clue what field-guide to take. In fact the last book on my shelves that I used regularly on Indian trips was the once-excellent but now hopelessly out-of-date “Pictorial Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” by Salim Ali et al. Published way back in 1983 it’s now more of a ‘worthy historical document’ than a useful field-guide, especially when compared with the lay-out and superb illustrations of many modern books.

Fortunately a good friend of mine has more bird books than one person could possibly need (actually, is such a thing possible?) and I whipped round to see if he had a suitable book I could borrow. As the authors would no doubt point out to me, “The Birds of Southern India” doesn’t actually cover Kolkata (which is in the north-east and has an avifauna subtly different to much of India) but that’s the one he had. “What do you reckon?” he asked. At first glance, the book looked very good indeed…

Helm Field Guides (now an imprint of A&C Black) are renowned for being high-quality productions, and this one looks no different. The cover lay-out is open and fresh, the paper used is chlorine-free and has a slightly glossy look which enhances the illustrations, and despite being a softback the book itself feels well-put together and looks like it would handle being pulled in and out of rucksack without falling apart. It’s also extremely light - which brings us round to the all-important content…

This guide is a successor to the much acclaimed “Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” by the same authors (Richard Grimmett and Tim Inskipp) and includes some 560 species that occur from Mumbai across to Chennai and all the way down onto the Maldives The two authors will be known to anyone with any sort of interest at all in birds of the Oriental region and I knew even without opening the book that the identification sections would be succinct, accurate and written from the point of view of skilled observers rather than someone working mainly from skins, and that any maps would be accurate and drawn from recent data. I’m right about the ID sections I’m sure which seem generally excellent (I’ve seen more than half the species described) - but I was wrong about the maps. Presumably in a space-saving exercise there are no maps at all - instead ranges are given with reference to the major Indian states that make up “southern India” (GO for Goa, TN for Tamil Nadu etc). It’s a little broad-brush but accurate data is frequently lacking for many regions, so understandable.

What is more confusing are the rather unusual status annotations - it took me several look-ups to understand that “KA: np” meant “not common passage migrant in Karnataka”, “MH: nr” meant “not common resident in Maharashtra” and so on. I can understand the reasons for the initials for locations, but what happened to “”u” for “uncommon”? Perhaps I’m being picky, but if there’s a difference between uncommon and not common - and I assume there is or why else change it - I can’t really grasp what it is. I’m ready to be enlightened of course…

The taxonomy and nomenclature follows Inskipp’s own An annotated checklist of the Birds of the Oriental region and looks to be very up to date, with several recent splits (eg Indian Spotted Eagle Aquila hastata split from Lesser Spotted Eagle A pomarina). In many instances there are descriptions (and illustrations) of different races too - an absolute requisite given the number of migratory races that appear in the region at different times of the year. More controversially the species follow a sequence based on DNA studies, rather than on the old Voous order that most birders will be familiar with. It’s a little disconcerting at first to use a guide that places eg woodpeckers and swifts before shorebirds, has flamingos and herons towards the latter half of the book, and has larks and pipits towards the end, but there are only 87 plates to sort through and it doesn’t take long to find whatever it is that you’re looking for. Will this “new” order replace the “old” long-term? Who knows, but the question should be - is the book made unuseable by shuffling things around? Of course not…(While I’m on “changing things around” one “modern” change I do take issue with is dropping imperial measurements (ie inches) entirely in favour of metric (ie centimetres). I might sound in danger of being an old fogey, but surely publishers could allow measurements in field-guides to be listed in both inches and centimetres? Granted, my eleven year old daughter looks blank when I describe something as being eighteen inches long - but many of us over thirty-fives weren’t taught the metric system at school. It’s a minor point, but one I wanted to make!)

One aspect of the text that is highly laudable is that - as the introduction to the guide states - “all the species that are globally threatened are indicated as such, with their IUCN threat category given in parantheses”. It’s a great idea - and should provide food for thought for any birders looking through this guide. The text is copyrighted “2005″, and I looked up a number of species I know well to see how this book treated them. In most cases they were accurate and up to date: unfortunately there have been some oversights - nothing listed against the description of Spoon-billed Sandpiper for instance, which was upgraded to “Endangered” by the IUCN in 2004.

Still that’s a fairly minor quibble, as no matter when a book is produced there will always be a new category, discovery or occurrence soon after publication: such is the speed that modern ornithology is working at. As I said before the text in the bulk of this guide is excellent, and there are additionally some extremely useful appendices looking at six difficult identification groups (the “Nightjars” table looks remarkably detailed), a long list of vagrants, and a superb introductory section that includes a discussion on India’s vultures (many of which have suffered 95% population declines over the last ten years due to the mis-use by livestock owners of the anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac and are teetering on the brink of extinction), photographs of some important habitats, and a detailed list of national and regional conservation and/or birdwatching organisations (complete with email contact details - something all books should copy in the future).

The guide is worth buying for the text alone, but birders inevitably turn to the illustrations first (we’re very much bird WATCHERS of course). These are mainly taken from “Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” (which I don’t own, but should I suppose), though there are some new illustrations of some southern races not in the former. A quick glance at the list of illustrators reveals the names of some of the best-known artists around (eg Clive Byers, Gerald Driessens, Alan Harris, Craig Robson), and the plates are really superb - and, as importantly, superbly reproduced by the publishers. There are some differences in artistic style but the plates are pretty consistent, and there’s no doubt that combined with the text most birds in the region are going to be easily identified (there’ll always be the odd atypical moult or worn plumage to cause difficulties of course, but that’s possible whatever guide you own). In fact I’d go as far as saying that this is - in toto - one of the most attractive field-guides on the market right now…

How did I get on with it in Kolkata? As I said initially, it’s not really a fair test to take a field-guide in to a region it’s not strictly designed for and as I was with two excellent Indian birders anyway (Sujan Chatterjee and Sumit Sen) I probably didn’t need it, but there’s nothing like a spot of revision the night before going into the field - and this guide definitely inspired confidence. I did have one small problem when I was trying to find the scientific name for Lineated Barbet (which is not in the guide) for my notes in the evening - I became a little confused whether what I’d seen was also called Brown-headed Barbet (which IS in the guide), but a quick check online soon cleared the confusion up - and to be honest the illustration is accurate enough that I should have known they were different species anyway.

On the whole then, I was glad I had it. If I were going on a birding trip to southern India proper I wouldn’t have any hesitation in taking this guide. If I were going on a longer trip to India that meant birding in the Himalayan foothills or a trip to the Thar Desert in the far west as well then I’d want the more complete - but bulkier of course - “Birds of the Indian Subcontinent”: but that’s not a criticism: the guide is designed to cover southern India, and it does that superbly. I don’t see that you’d need to carry another book, and I really don’t imagine you’d have any “bird” problems at all…particularly if you did more than one evening’s research before going!

Summary:
Softback, 240 pages, 87 colour plates. This guide is a successor to the acclaimed Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by the same authors. Covering southern India, the superb plates are accompanied by a succinct text highlighting identification, voice, habitat, altitudinal range, distribution and status. The text is on facing pages to the plates, for easy reference. Beautifully-produced this guide is a perfect size for use in the field and should be considered an essential companion for visiting the region.
ISBN 0-7136-5164-4