READERS DIGEST COMPLETE BOOK OF NEW ZEALAND

Forest and Bird, Volume 16, Issue 2, 1 May 1985, Page 32

READERS DIGEST COMPLETE BOOK OF NEW

ZEALAND

published Readers Digest Sydney and

Reed Methuen. 320pp. $45. The Readers Digest makes lovely books: fine colour, clear prose, high quality paper and binding, and this one is no exception. It is a review of modern knowledge about our birds contributed by more than 80 ornithologists under the consultant editor C. J. R. Robertson. The book also acknowledges the pioneering work of Dr W. R. B. Oliver whose New Zealand Birds this book presumes to replace. It begins with the usual Digest introduction — Understanding Birds — well illustrated with New Zealand examples. The major part of the book, however, is devoted to studies of birds. Generally there is a large page for every bird report from the New Zealand region, each with an essay supplemented by a column on field characteristics, moult, voice and distribution, plus a highlighted paragraph on recognition. There is also a puzzling reference to size: a single measurement but for what? Every bird appears in a colour portrait, looking good, often on the nest, sometimes in Australia. The scope of the book produces some curious features. A single record of a vagrant bird dating back, perhaps to the nineteenth century, still rates the standard entry. The result is that in looking fora familiar bird one wades past plate after plate of species one will never see. It might have been more helpful to spend the space on pictures of birds which cause confusion to birdwatchers, showing the differences between more familiar ones such as the male and female chaffinch, young and adult blackbacked gull, the black and pied phases of the fantail, the pheasant or even the sparrow. On the credit side there is a lot of material published in popular form for the first time. This is particularly so for several rare and endangered species. If this criticism sounds testy it is because of the book’s implied claim to be a complete and worthy replacement for Oliver. Viewed instead on its own merits this is a very nice, and interesting work about New Zealand’s birds, at a very fair price. G.C.E. Pa