Over the years, the illustrations in Australian field guides have varied in their accuracy and aesthetic appearance. Moreover, while all guides included images showing any sexual variation in plumage, none showed age-related and geographical variation of all species. The opportunity to fill these gaps came in 1990 with the inception of the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (or simply, HANZAB), published by Oxford University Press and Birds Australia (now BirdLife Australia). Undeniably the ‘bible’ of Australian birds, collating and condensing everything that has ever been written about our birds, HANZAB’s seven massive volumes took nearly two decades to complete. Among the six artists employed to paint its 413 plates were Slater, Nicolas Day, and Frank Knight, all of whom had illustrated field guides. Newcomer Jeff Davies painted most of the plates for the first four volumes, and Peter Marsack and Kim Franklin contributed to the other three volumes. HANZAB’s plates depicted, for the first time, juvenile and immature, as well as adult plumages, of most subspecies of the 957 species recorded in the region.

Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds, vol. 7, 2006 (Oxford University Press)Indispensable for anyone studying Australian birds, HANZAB’s price tag nevertheless put it beyond reach of the vast majority of amateur birders. Realising this, one of its editors, Danny Rogers, joined forces with two other professional ornithologists Peter Menkhorst and Rohan Clarke and three of HANZAB’s artists, to produce a guide that illustrated the full range of variation of each species, yet was accessible to everyone. Nine years in development, the Australian Bird Guide (ABG) brings together many of the better features of previous guides. Apparently modelled on the highly successful Collin’s Bird Guide (1999) to European birds, each plate of illustrations features up to twenty bird images, each labelled with its sex, race, or age, and accompanied by brief notes on salient identification features. The facing page comprises two columns of text, with maps for each species along the bottom. About the same size as those in previous guides, these maps are infinitely more accurate, being based on analyses of an incredible sixteen million distributional records. In the case of species with restricted distributions, they are also larger in scale, allowing greater detail. As in Morecombe’s guide, shading is used to indicate where a species is commonest, and any subspecies are shown in different colours, though you may need a magnifying glass to read their names.

The most obvious physical attribute of this book is its gargantuan size. As self-evident, field guides are normally designed for use in the ‘field’, naturalists’ parlance for outside the house. As birding often entails a lot of walking, a practical field guide should be portable enough to carry in a bag or day-pack. Thus field guides inevitably represent a compromise between being compact and sufficiently comprehensive to enable the identification of all of the species found in the region of interest. The ABG delivers abundantly on the latter, but has sacrificed portability. At almost 1.5 kilograms, it is twenty-five per cent heavier than the next heaviest field guide. Though very similar in width and height to the Morcombe guide, the ABG has over 100 more pages, in spite of the (sensible) absence of a section on breeding habits. This growth in size is due to increases in both the number of illustrations per species, and the number of species themselves, which has risen dramatically with each successive field guide, despite the number of known ‘genuine’ Australian birds residents and regular visitors barely changing over the last few decades.

The increase in species derives from several sources, the foremost being a burgeoning interest in the birds of Australia’s remote territories, such as Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef, and Torres Strait islands. While some of these species are resident on one island or another, the majority are vagrants species that accidentally blow in from neighbouring Indonesia and New Guinea. The list of vagrants turning up in Australia also grows annually. Accordingly, the ABG includes illustrations of 154 species of confirmed vagrants and even a few ‘potential vagrants’ to Australia and its offshore territories, but rather than being lumped together at the rear of the book, as in Morcombe’s and most overseas guides, each is depicted next to the regularly occurring species with which it is most likely to be confused. This arrangement will undoubtedly gratify rarities ‘twitchers’, ever keen to find new species to add to their Australian list, but possibly not beginners, for whom illustrations of so many improbable birds may be distracting.

One significant and welcome departure of this guide from its predecessors is the grouping of species into three broad environments (biomes) rather than following a sequence based on the relatedness of species on the evolutionary tree, as do most field guides. Thus seabirds and shorebirds, groups that are unrelated to each other, can conveniently be found in the ‘marine and coastal birds’ section, while ducks and herons are bundled into ‘freshwater birds’. The remaining species are categorised as ‘land birds’, by far the largest section. As in the Morcombe guide, the three sections are identified by small colour tabs in the upper corner of each page, and there is a ‘visual quick reference’ depicting typical members of all bird families inside the front cover. This pragmatic arrangement allows users to find the bird group they are seeking without requiring a PhD in bird classification, which has been changing continuously since the advent of DNA-based studies, a point made in the introductory chapter on the evolution and classification of Australian birds, authored by phylogeneticist Leo Joseph.

Helmeted Honeyeater at Healesville Sanctuary, Victoria (phtograph by Dylan Sanusi-Goh, Wikimedia Commons)

The size of a bird is often an important clue to its identity, and for this reason, field guides normally provide the average body length, in centimetres, for each species. The ABG, however, presents the range of wing lengths, bill lengths, and body weights. This unconventional approach is defended on the grounds that body length measurements are usually taken on dead specimens preserved in unnatural positions, and are of questionable accuracy. As true as this may be, I doubt that knowing the wing length and weight of a bird will comfort novice birders trying to get a feel for its overall size. On the other hand, many beginners will applaud the insertion, on the first line of each species account, of a circle which indicates the likelihood of encountering the species. An informative seven-page essay on bird plumages and moult in the introductory section goes beyond what might be expected in a field guide, but is written in an easily digestible style that may encourage birders to pay more attention to such details, especially important in ageing shorebirds.

Summing up, the ABG is undeniably the most comprehensive field guide to be published in Australia to date, surpassing previous guides in the quantity and accuracy of illustrations and pertinent information. But this has come at the expense of portability this is a book for the car or bookshelf, not the day-pack. Many birders will already have one or other of the e-guide apps available for mobiles and iPads, which have the extremely useful addition of sound recordings of bird calls, as well as illustrations that can be located as quickly as one can press keys on a keypad. No doubt there are plans afoot to digitise the ABG too, so watch this space.