A key challenge facing birders when visiting a country in an unfamiliar part of the world is working out which species they have a chance of connecting with during their visit. Regional field guides, of course, are indispensable, but they have a number of shortcomings:

• they are published and updated infrequently, meaning they cannot provide the latest information about species
• they are generally inclusive, meaning they describe every bird species that has been recorded in the country

To save birdwatchers the trouble of trawling through online information to supplement the details in their regional field guides, the All the World’s Birds (ATWB) Companion Guides series of Country Guides provides a set of reference eBooks of regularly occurring species for selected countries.

Each eBook in the series will be updated annually to reflect the latest internationally accepted status of bird species as defined in The Global Avian Checklist maintained by the AviList Core Team. Birders can download the free Kindle reading app to whichever device they will be taking with them.

Country Guides have been designed to assist birders in understanding which bird species they can expect to have a chance of encountering within subregions of a selected country. Subregions are selected primarily on the basis of biogeographical features that support distinct habitats and hence different subsets of the country’s avifauna. These in turn are derived from the ornithological subregions that make up ‘Focus On’ regions.

‘Focus On’ regions have been selected for their biodiversity. Examples are: Southern Africa, Wallacea, Eastern Australasia, North-West South America, North America (including Caribbean).

Some countries lie wholly within a ‘Focus On’ region. Others are comprised of subregions from more than one ‘Focus On’ region.

Each Country Guide has a number of important features, including:

– A listing of all the bird species that are regularly present in each subregion of the country that is the subject of the guide

– An indication of where within the wider ‘Focus On’ region or regions each bird family and species can be found in its native state

– Spotlighted species that have a restricted range within the ‘Focus On’ region(s), or a restricted worldwide range

 

The key feature of all eBooks in the Companion Guide series is the way you can quickly and simply access relevant, up to date online information about every featured bird species. If your reading device is connected to the internet, a single click will take you to a search results page for a species, from where you can continue to search for additional information to whatever level of detail you desire.

 

Within each COUNTRY GUIDE eBook you will find the following sections:

REGION LISTS – lists of all birds that are recognized as species in the AviList and which regularly occur in each subregion of the country that is the subject of the guide

COMPLETE LIST – taxonomic details of these birds, showing each species’ order, family, genus and scientific name

SPOTLIGHTED BIRDS – country, local and regional endemics, plus selected specialty birds that have a restricted range within the wider ‘Focus On’ region(s)

INTRODUCED AND OTHER SPECIES – birds that may be regularly encountered in the wild but which are not native to the country, plus species that were once or may have been ‘regularly present’ but are no longer regularly present

QUICK REFERENCE – follow the links to find birds based on their common English names