Paul Milne (Helm/A&C Black, 2006)

So, what do we have here? Hmm, according to the Introduction, a book for the travelling professional with a pair of binoculars tucked away in his or her carry-on luggage who may have enough time between meetings to hop in a cab and get down to the nearest park or wetland for a few hours in the field: in essence, a Guide to birding sites close to 61 cities worldwide, with instructions how to get them and what you might see when you do…

Sounds like a good idea really, and one that I feel pretty well qualified to talk about. After all, thanks to eighteen years working with an airline I’ve probably been to more ‘World Cities’ than most birders and been to most of them more than once.

Okay, a quick overview: it’s written by Paul Milne (editor of the Irish Bird Report); it’s well-produced (by Helm/A&C Black, so that’s almost a given considering the production standard of this most birder-friendly of publishers), with a clean page and a rather nice colour theme based on soft shades of purple and violet (much better in the flesh than it sounds, I promise); it has a long list of estimable contributors from around the world (who I guess probably actually wrote - or at least ‘refereed’, as the author puts it - most of the individual site descriptions); and it has masses of information which is carefully and thoughtfully laid-out (including distances in km to the sites, opening times, and in many cases a map).

The choice of cities reviewed covers a large chunk of the world, particularly those that business people might get to - though there is a large bias towards Europe (20) and North America (12) , and just three from ‘Australasia’ and six from Africa (with none from eg Nigeria or Ghana, which is a shame as more exposure for the few pressured sites remaining in West Africa would be very useful from a conservation standpoint). However, there is a good choice of sites to visit when the traveller gets to the cities that are listed, including all the sorts of places I’d normally head off to myself like Botanical gardens, major parks, wetland centres etc. There’s also a useful list of contacts and birding organisations for each metropolitan area covered (many of which will need to be contacted well in advance, incidentally, as I’ve sometimes discovered in the past).

So, how accurate and useful are the almost 500 pages (which, incidentally, is good value considering the GBP16.99 cover price)?

I’ve had a read through most of the accounts for the cities I know well, and the access info and the birds mentioned that you’re likely to see are on the whole pretty accurate. Birding experiences will vary on the day of course, and some of the species summaries are on the optimistic side: I’ve been to a couple of the sites a few times and not even got close to some of the birds listed (there are Secretarybirds at Suikerbosrand? Who knew…(Jo’burg, page 46), and you’ll be doing well to clean up all the thrushes listed for a winter visit to Tai Po Kau (Hong Kong, page 96) - but that’s going to be true for any book like this of course. There are some odd ‘misses’ too (no Nordmann’s Greenshank listed for Kapar Ash Ponds, now one of the best sites in the world to see wintering Nordmann’s (Kuala Lumpur, page 114) for example), but on the whole for a broadbrush approach the info is very helpful.

Be aware though that one problem with any guide to ‘city birding’ is that it needs to be updated regularly - Song Do (Seoul, page 144), for example, has already been almost completely destroyed (and as I’m mentioning Seoul and the info given, the conservation organisation I co-founded in South Korea dropped the politically-expedient WBKEnglish in favour of Birds Korea a long time ago), and the last time I visited Bolsa Chica (Los Angeles, page 391) it was closed off for long-term and extensive habitat improvement. In fact, the thought did occur to me that this Guide will one day be a very valuable reference for authors wondering where birders in the early 21st century went before rising sea levels took out coastal cities and there were still parks in the world’s new mega-cities…

What else? Well, a little more information on how safe or otherwise it is to visit some of the sites on your own would help - I stopped going to Nairobi Arboretum (Nairobi, page 56) a few years ago after being followed around by three lads who were far too interested in my binoculars for comfort, for example (locals apparently know the place as the Nairobbery Arboretum!), and Miami scares the heck out of me at the best of times - but I suppose in these litigious times saying in print that somewhere’s safe is a risk most authors (or their editors) won’t want to take.

Another helpful pointer - given that the book is aimed at birders with little time to spare, or those the author thinks might be nipping out between flights (it takes a strong nerve to do THAT in these days of long queues at the security scanners) - would be an assessment of distances/time: there is a very great difference between travelling 25km in, say, Australia, where roads are good and traffic density low, and travelling the 25km out of Seoul to Gwangneung Arboretum, which can take hours, often has awful traffic along clogged highways, and climaxes in one of the most unnerving roads I’ve ever driven on. However, I guess if you’re prepared to make excursions like that on your own, you’re probably a well-seasoned traveller anyway and will take things like this into account…

I’m probably sounding a little half-hearted in this review, and I don’t mean to be, but I’m going to have to own up here and admit to coming to this book with mixed feelings. On the one hand I kind of feel that I must be amongst the sort of travelling birder it’s aimed at, but on the other there’s just so much information on “city hotspots” available on the internet, why do I need to buy a book - even one as nicely-produced and packed with information as this one (to be honest I even thought about writing just such a guide but never did: I decided to put what I knew online and started a blog instead)? Just how many cities would a birder travelling on business normally visit to need to buy this guide (one of them? Ten perhaps? Twenty?) - and when they went abroad would they need to carry a book that details sites in 61 cities if they only had enough available time to visit one or two of them? As for the sites, if I was that serious a birder to go to some of the more ‘difficult’ areas listed wouldn’t I have hired a guide before I left home to whisk me around?

If all that sounds a little over-picky, I’m sorry. Paul Milne has done a good job rounding up all the contributors, writes well, and Helm have - as usual - done a great production job. It’s a good book, and will suit some buyers very well - but my one question still remains: in a nutshell, even though it’s relatively inexpensive why would I buy it? It may well come in useful for planning a trip, but to be frank it’s easy enough just to print off a few up-to-date pages from any number of accessible websites and stuff them in your pocket instead…

Summary:
Softback (2006), 496 pages, “Where To Watch Birds: World Cities”, Paul Milne. A well-written and well-produced guide to birding sites in 61 of the world’s major cities. Aimed at business travellers rather than birders on holiday, this is an interesting round-up of sites, access, likely birds etc. It’s relatively inexpensive for the information contained within its almost 500 pages, and will probably find the market it’s aimed at (though whether it will be considered indispensable only time will tell).