Wildlife Conservation Society Birds of Brazil: The Atlantic Forest of Southeast Brazil, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (WCS Birds of Brazil Field Guides) (VOLUME 2)

Beautiful book in the same Wildlife Conservation Society series with the Birds of Brazil: Pantanal and Cerrado of Central Brazil. The series is published by the Cornell University Press. The authors are top notch and the illustrations are outstanding. The species range maps are next to the species description for ease of reference. English, Latin, and Portuguese names are provided and indexed. The main drawback for someone wanting to use this as a field guide is its size: 432 glossy pages, just a bit smaller than the large Sibley Guide to Birds. On the other hand, it is smaller than Ber van Perlo's excellent and comprehensive Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil (Oxford University Press), and the illustrations are larger. The alternatives include Tomas Sigrist's 2 volume field guide (one volume with illustrations and the other with text), which is a good reference but less handy (it has text in both Portuguese and English, which takes additional space), and the Princeton University Press Illustrated Checklist volumes for South America, which divide the continent by region, which may work for you if you will be in just one region of this very large country. (Brazil is larger than the continental US and there are many different habitat regions.) Also a consideration, the Princeton guides are a handy size, but the range maps are at the back of the book, separated from the species entries and pictures. In addition, there are individual guides for SE Brazil, for example, a very nicely produced book by Honkala and Niiranen A Birdwatching Guide to South-east Brazil, which has photos of the species and extensive information on the best birding sites in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo, and Sao Paulo (mainly in the Mato Atlantico) and what you might find there. In Brazil you can buy Develey and Endrigo's Aves da Grande Sao Paulo that has short species descriptions in Portuguese and covers Sao Paulo state, including Intervales. In short, there are now several excellent references for birders chasing the close to 1900 species in Brazil, but there is still a need for small field guides, or even an app of this series of books. I just purchased the Nature Guides Oxford app for iOS based on van Perlo's Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil. It cost $14.99, which is very reasonable. Have not used the app much yet, but it has bird songs and photos in addition to the information in the Oxford field guide. One oddity of the app is that you can enlarge the photos only by spreading your fingers and holding--if you take your fingers off the screen the photo shrinks back to normal size. The enlarged photos are sharp, so you can see the ear marks of a hummingbird, for instance. Would be nice to have the option of double-tapping the photo for a static enlargement that reduces when you tap it again, a common app feature. Since my first birding trip to Brazil in 2009 the references have gotten quite a bit better and more diverse. I look forward to the remaining volumes of this 5 volume project.

This book is very helpful for identifying the birds in southeastern Brazil (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo etc). I like that the book includes a brief introduction to Brazil and its various habitats. The illustrations are well done and the descriptions are helpful. They even include the Portuguese common name of each species, which I found to be useful and accurate when speaking with non-english speakers. The back of the book includes an index by species names in both english and portuguese which is useful for quickly finding the right page. When I bird I often use the Merlin app to aid in identification, especially when trying to identify a bird based on song, but I prefer this book when comparing similar species on sight. It has been invaluable.

THE GOOD: This is the second volume in a planned five volume series of regional field guides that will, collectively, cover all of Brazil. It is a great solution to the dilemma existing for comprehensive single-country field guides with respect to the many species-rich South American countries: either they are too large and heavy for field use because they have to cover so many species, or they give abbreviated species accounts, often lack range maps, and use small illustrations with twenty or more species crammed together on a single page. With the regional guide approach, you can have the best of both worlds: guides that are light enough to carry in the field and which have fully informative species accounts and large, high-quality illustrations.This guide follows the same format, has the same high-quality text and illustrations, and large range maps, as the first guide in the series, covering the Pantanal and Cerrado. There is also a nice introductory section reviewing the habitats of the region, and highlighting conservation concerns. It is a little heavier since it covers 200 more species (927 in all), but still a nice weight for field use.Once the series is complete, these should be better than any of the existing field guides to the birds of Brazil, both in terms of portability and depth of treatment.THE BAD: Nevertheless, there is some room for improvement.–First, the guides lack any quick index to the birds; all field guides become much more useful with such indices, and every field guide needs one. Serious birders create their own where they must; but that is a time-consuming task that should be the responsibility of field guide authors.–Second, the species accounts are admirable in containing a lot of information by field guide standards. However, unlike other guides, there are no bold headings within the species accounts, e.g. habitat, distribution, behavior, voice, etc., that help the reader quickly locate the information he or she is looking for. Given the length of some of the accounts, this would have definitely been helpful.--Third, illustrations of passerine plumages is unhelpfully sparse in places. Almost no juvenile passerine plumages are illustrated, and only male or female plumages are illustrated in some cases, even when the plumages are quite distinct. In other cases, only the head of the bird is illustrated in a distinct plumage. These limitations are a result of trying to economize by borrowing all the passerine illustrations from Ridgely & Tudor’s "Field Guide to the Songbirds of South America". That book is similarly limited in terms of plumage illustrations. Hence, serious birders may want to supplement this guide with other books, e.g. the van Perlo guide, which at least has more male and female plumages illustrated.–Finally, the guide mostly follows IOC nomenclature and taxonomy. SACC/AOU taxonomy is more widely followed among birders in the Western Hemisphere. Given the authors choice to use IOC, they should at least prominently display alternative SACC names. Instead, if these are mentioned at all, they are buried at the very end of the textual description.ERRORS/OMISSIONS: Long-tufted Screech-Owl, which can be found in southeastern Brazil, e.g. at Intervales State Park, is not covered in the guide. Festive Coquette is listed as a Brazilian endemic even though it ranges throughout much of western South America, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, etc.

It is the very best field guide! :-)

A very nice field guide with beautiful artwork, good text and nicely done range maps. I will be using this guide in October 2022. A little heavy for a field guide but not too much if one uses a field bag.

Very nicely done. Looking forward to putting this book to use.

Good quality paper.