“Field Guide to Australian Birds”
Written and illustrated by Michael Morcombe (Steve Parrish Publishing 2004)

Review: August 2005

The last Australian field-guide I bought was an early edition of Simpson and Day’s classic “Field Guide to the Birds of Australia” way back in the early-1990s. At the time this was an innovative book, sturdy with large illustrations, full of splits and potential splits, and an extraordinary ID drawing of a swift that showed it lying on its back dead - that one image seemed very “Australian” and appealed to the youthful and rebellious streak in me immensely (particularly as the excellent but rather staid “Peterson-style” of guide-book had begun to dominate the market).

However, Australian ornithology has moved on a long way in the last ten years. Taxonomic research has brought plenty of changes to the Australian species list, habitat change has affected a number of already declining species (particularly rainforest birds), and the growing number of Australian birders have added many new species and re-written the statuses of many others - seabirds especially. And the days of illustrating any species by way of a corpse seem to be long gone - with all the threats that birds face these days it just doesn’t seem appropriate somehow in my opinion…

All of which meant that it was time to get myself a new, up to date field-guide - and a trip to Melbourne provided the perfect excuse. Which one to get though?

I won’t turn this review into some sort of magnum opus by describing every guide I looked at and why I narrowed the choice quickly down to the one I finally bought - thinking back it was probably because I wanted to get on with birding rather more than I wanted to stand in a bookshop - but I ended up with Michael Morcombe’s “Field Guide to Australian Birds - Complete Compact Edition in the handy pocket sized format” (phew). And now that I’ve had the chance to use it a couple of times, I think I’m glad that I did.

That last line may sound like I’ll be damning this book with faint praise, but that’s not quite true. I like it a great deal, but I have reservations. The reviews on the back of the jacket - which incidentally were both written for websites originally, and are for the larger full-size book that preceded this “compact edition” - are fulsome and very positive. One, by the well-known webmaster of the Fatbirder website, Bo Boelens, points out how Morcombe’s illustrations are very similar in style to those of David Sibley’s drawings for his excellent “The North American Bird Guide“. I don’t normally disagree with Bo, but for me the one area where this guide does disappoint are the illustrations: it’s not that they’re inaccurate exactly, it’s just that sometimes they seem very basic, almost like unfinished sketches - feather groups are broad-brushed in many cases, and Morcombe seems to have difficulty knowing how to make a bird’s eye look realistic. Compared with the incredibly detailed and life-like illustrations of Europe’s birds by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterstrom in the superb “Collins Birds Guide“, some of the birds within the pages here just don’t look “right”. The Gulls and many of the shorebirds in particular are way off - if I had never seen a Lesser Black-backed Gull before I’d be very pushed to make a positive ID using this book alone, and neither Tattler species look like any of the Tattlers I’ve seen in Asia or the USA. And don’t get me started on the Asian flycatchers - both Narcissus and Blue-and-white Flycatchers are stunning birds in life, but you wouldn’t know that looking at the illustrations here…

Yet many of the pages, like those depicting the fairy-wrens and some of the parrots are wonderful. It’s the vagrants that cause the problems it seems. Of course if you’re going on a birding holiday to Australia it’s not the vagrants you’ll be looking for but the native birds - and most of them are readily identifiable using this book (at least in my experience which encompasses much of Victoria, Eastern Australia and areas around Perth in the west).

If I’m not that happy with some of the illustrations why did I buy the book? Fair question, and the answer is because of the text and the maps. For a book billed as being a “pocket-size format” - though to be accurate you’d need very deep jacket pockets to fit this chunky 4″ x 8.5″/2.5cm x 10cm guide into them comfortably - it has a staggering amount of information inside it.

There are masses of detailed text inside this guide: descriptions of the various forms many species assume across this vast country, their songs and calls, loads of ID pointers, and some of the best designed maps I’ve ever seen - where the core and outlying ranges of hundreds of species are shown by solid colours that grade into lighter ones. It’s a great concept and easily deciphered. Another skilfully handled technique is the use of different colours to show the ranges of different forms of the same species - in the case of White-browed Scrubwren, for example, nine colours are used to illustrate the ranges of nine subspecies (and one of those is two-toned to show the core and outlying areas), and the map still somehow remains clear and user-friendly!

It’s quite an achievement given how small the maps are. And of course they are small - as is the tiny font used to place all this information onto the page. Having said that, though, there is still plenty of “white space” on the page (which makes them comfortable to look at) and the species accounts are models of clarity and conciseness: the publishers haven’t been forced to use a small font because the author is verbose - he just has a lot of information to give us, and not much space to do it in. Personally I think they’ve done an excellent job - certainly good enough to get me to part with my hard-earned cash anyway…and - as I have Lesser Black-backed Gulls nesting near my house - I’m sure I could identify pretty much anything I’m likely to see on any future visits…

So despite my reservations about the artwork there is much to recommend this book. The text and layout really overcome any shortcomings - and of course just because I prefer a different style of illustration to these doesn’t mean that someone else won’t rave about them (it’s won three awards and become the most popular book on Aussie birds on the market, so they can’t be putting off many people). On top of what’s inside this looks to be a very well-produced book too. It has survived being pulled in and out of a rucksack so far (admittedly that’s not very much to date, but I have confidence it’ll stand the test of time), and the wipe-clean transparent sleeve that encases the book easily shrugged off an accidentally spilled orange-juice. If I were standing in that same bookshop as I was last August, contemplating which field-guide to buy, knowing what I know now I’d have still come away with this one.

Summary:
Softback, 384 pages, Michael Morcombe. Field Guide to Australian Birds: Complete Compact Edition. This award-winning book, now in “Complete Compact Edition” format is absolutely packed with up-to-date information on Australia’s fantastic avifauna. Despite a few reservation about the quality of some of the illustrations this is still an essential buy for anyone planning a visit, and is highly recommended. ISBN: 1740215591