The Birds of Ecuador: Field Guide

Rating:
Summary: Good Book, Terrible Package, Shameful Waste
Review: Birders take large field guides such as this to an office supply store to have the plates removed and bound separately. This makes the plates practical for field work. Ridgely and Greenfield have to know this. The problem with this book is no gutters. When you spiral bind the plates, you lose significant material on each page: text on the left and pictures on the right. My bound plates were full of birds without heads. What a shame this book was designed so thoughtlessly. I threw mine away and went back to using the old Birds of Columbia guide by Hilty and Tudor.

Rating:
Summary: A neotropical must-have
Review: I finally ordered this magnificent guide, and now I wish I would have bought it sooner. This should be on every travelling birder's bookshelf. Just glancing through the plates makes me just want to hop aboard the next flight to Quito. Before buying this title, I heard plenty of contrasting opinions on the quality of Greenfield's plates. Being quite picky with artwork, and prefering that of the elite artists (Ian Lewington, Tim Worfolk, etc) I was a bit nervous. But overall I feel that the plates are very good. The colors, in particular, are very bright, and the plates are aesthetically pleasing. In comparison to Guy Tudor's plates (found in the Colombia and Venezuela Guides), I feel Greenfield measures up very well. I'll admit that some birds aren't drawn as well as Tudor's, but many of his plates are better than those in the Colombia guide. I would definitely take the Ecuador guide to Colombia or Peru, along with those countries' respective guides. As for the text, it is very detailed and distribution maps are placed right beside the text so you don't have to keep flipping around. The maps contain elevation information, and show the locations of two principal cities (Quito and Guayaquil-spelling?) for reference. I haven't yet seen volume 1, but I am assuming it is just as impressively done.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Plates and distribution maps
Review: I just received my copy of the The Birds of Ecuador and am very
pleased with it. I think the plates are very good with a lot of
detail. I compared plates for the same species in the book: A Guide To The Birds of Costa Rica, an excellent book also, and
found the detail to be better in The Birds of Ecuador. I also
really like the distribution maps for each species. I am
planning to do a birding trip to Ecuador and the maps will help
in making the travelling plans.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Plates and distribution maps
Review: I just received my copy of the The Birds of Ecuador and am very
pleased with it. I think the plates are very good with a lot of
detail. I compared plates for the same species in the book: A Guide To The Birds of Costa Rica, an excellent book also, and
found the detail to be better in The Birds of Ecuador. I also
really like the distribution maps for each species. I am
planning to do a birding trip to Ecuador and the maps will help
in making the travelling plans.

Rating:
Summary: Birds of Ecuador - a heavy weight champion?
Review: I just returned from a trip from Ecuador where I used extensively Volume II of Ridgely et als' book. Having already some acqaitance with both the birdlife of the Neotropics and the bird books on the region I found the plates and the text still very useful when identifying the birds I and my travel mates saw. The weight and the size of the book is, however, making its use very difficult out in the field. The paperback editions did not hold very well during the three weeks, and publishing the book in 3 rather than two volumes could have helped that a lot. Even though the plates do not live up to the quality of the standard dictated by Guy Tudor in the, yet, two-volume handbook on South american birds, but I still found the pictures very informative. The text on habitat, altitudinal distribution, call, and the range maps often helped to narrow down the number of look-alike-species to a manageable level, especially when identifying hummingbirds or tyrant flycatchers.
All in all (and getting back to the question in the title) I could not call this book a champion in the league of field guides for being overweight (just try to carry it on the 'D' trail near Bellavista), although it truly deserves the four stars for the text and the plates alike. If you use it as a 'hotel' rather than a field guide or need it as a reference work for your home library (or have the plates and the text of Vol. II rebound separetely, as I did) you will appreciate the amount of information gathered in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Bird Bible for Ecuador arrives. Strengthen your doormats.
Review: There are probably only two ways of approaching this book. Firstly on your knees, bowing low and, secondly, after several weeks of serious weight-training. I have recently come back from a short bird-watching holiday to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. I knew these books were coming out, but they weren't out in time for me. So, like thousands of birdwatchers in the past, I had to make do with Hilty & Brown's "Birds of Colombia" (Princeton University Press) as the next best thing. Hilty & Brown is an EXCELLENT book, but Ecuador has some 500 more bird species than Colombia and is arguably the richest birding country on the planet. A comparison is instructive. Hilty & Brown's paperback covers its remit in 820 pages and weighs 1.3kg. Ridgely & Greenfield consists of two paperback volumes totalling nearly 1600 pages which,in their thick cardboard slipcase, weigh 3.1 kg ! Hence the need for weight-training - even so, these may be more than you can comfortably carry and even the authors suggest you leave one volume at home ! Both Paperbacks are called "The Birds of Ecuador" but one is sub-titled "Vol. I. Status, Abundance & Taxonomy", whilst the other is "Vol. II. Field Guide". They are VERY different. Volume II is the more immediately traditional. It is 740 pages long, has nearly 100 colour plates illustrating the birds of Ecuador and is supported by a text giving details of each bird, habits, voice etc. and a distribution map. Volume I is 850 pages long and only has one illustration. It has an 80-page section on various topics such as ecosystems, migration, conservation, a history of Ecuadorian birdwatching, a gazeteer. The rest is a detailed account for each species of abundance and distribution in different districts and important birding sites in Ecuador. Are there any limitations ? Yes, chiefly geographical ones. The authors have deliberately left out the Galapagos (which belong to Ecuador) and have restricted seabirds to those that can be seen for a few kilometres out to sea. They also omit the large "Disputed Territory" which either belongs to Ecuador or Peru depending on whose map you look at - on balance this is probably a wise precaution. Some of the illustrations look as if they have come from Ridgely's masterwork on the Birds of South America but since this is only appearing at the rate of about one volume every decade this is hardly a criticism. Do you need both volumes - given that you can buy them separately if you want ? The answer is probably YES. I think if you had only bought volume I you would definitely NEED volume II - the Field Guide. If you had only bought Volume II you would WANT Volume I as well. Ecuador should be on the wish list of every travelling birdwatcher and these books should therefore be on the shopping list. Without serious competition, they are the immediate "Bible" for the birds of Ecuador and should be treated with reverence as a labour of love, a work of high scholarship and a delight to birdwatchers everywhere.

Rating:
Summary: A bird lovers dream.
Review: This book is filled with many beautyful pictures and lots of information on the birds of Ecuador. I've been to Ecuador many times for both bussiness and pleasure and let me tell you from experience the birds on that island are extremly rare, exotic, and most importantly beautyful. Full of colors and energy. I may self am a big bird lover. And being used to the dull everyday birds of New England, these birds are quite exciting. So if you are a bird lover or may be thinking about it this a good book to get started with, however long time bird watchers may want to look elsewere.

Rating:
Summary: A first-class new South American bird guide
Review: This field guide to the birds of Ecuador is the first covering this small country with a staggering 1600 species of birds.

The text, focusing on identification and describing appearance, habitat, habits, and voice, is detailed and incorporates the latest information from the people most knowledgeable about Ecuador's birds. The paintings on the 96 plates are beautiful, among the finest of any field guide anywhere, and seem thoroughly accurate. The birds are painted in standardized poses, which allows a focus on identification. Unlike almost all field guides to countries in the tropics, all are by one artist, with the resulting benefits of consistency. The guide seems to make the identification of difficult families like flycatchers or antbirds or Ecuador's 132 species of hummingbirds easier (well, less impossible) than ever. Unlike other South American guides, all species, including migrants, are illustrated, and all in color.

The 1600 species distribution maps are not at the world-class level of North American maps or even the new India guide, but they are tremendously helpful and, given the state of information in the tropics, a great accomplishment and a major advance. It is convenient that they are right in the text, with altitude information (critical for the Andean region) attached.

Since Ecuador has about half of the species in South America, this book will be valuable for anyone looking at birds in the Amazon basin or northern South America.

Note that the field guide is volume 2 of the set. Volume I has detailed information on taxonomy, status, and especially occurence and distribution within Ecuador, plus general information about Ecuadorian geography and ornithology, which would have made the field guide impossibly large. (It's massive as is.)

Rating:
Summary: A useful but bulky field guide
Review: What a set of books, no doubt about that! For the first time, there is a full set of very useful color plates for one of the core South American countries. It is certainly a great accomplishment to have all the species pictured in color and on a more or less consistent standard. However, I do not agree with other reviewers who rave about the plates. Too many of the bird pictures have an overall flat appearance, with the color rendition being too simplistic or too bold. And while a good number of the birds are depicted in good or even unnessessarily large size, others would have benefitted from a larger sized rendition. Just because a species is small does not mean it has to be depicted in a diminutive size, unless there are larger species of the same group on the plate. Thus, while the plates are most useful, it is nevertheless disappointing to see that the overall standard (except for the plates being all in color) is rather lower than what was already published decades ago e.g. in "Birds of Colombia".
The field guide volume has excellent range maps and very helpful comprehensive texts. A somewhat more compact layout would have allowed for a smaller overall size of the book, however. The way to do it is being demonstrated in the book itself. The texts facing the plates use the suggested compact layout most convincingly. Spanish bird names are given in the main text, but, unfortunately, there is no index for them. To conclude, this is by far the more useful field guide for the general area than the also new "Birds of Peru" with its almost non-existing texts, lack of range maps and much less satisfactory plates. (P.S. This is a revised review as I think my first version did not do the book justice.)