One of the major challenges facing birders when visiting an unfamiliar part of the world is working out which species they have a chance of connecting with during their visit. Traditional 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, regional distribution etc
• they are generally inclusive, meaning they describe every bird species that has been recorded in the region, leaving the reader to sift through the vagrants, casuals and irruptive species that visiting birders are a lot less likely to encounter

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 Interactive Checklists is here to help. Over time, this series of eBooks will provide a library of up to date listings for areas of the world that are popular with birders.

Each eBook in the series will be updated annually to reflect the latest internationally accepted status of bird species as defined by the International Ornithological Congress (IOC). The eBooks will be priced low and will be formatted for all Kindle reading devices (tablets, smartphones, computers). Birders can download the free Kindle reading app to whichever device they will be taking with them.

 

Interactive Checklists have been designed to assist birders in understanding which bird species they can expect to have a chance of encountering within a selected local area. Each local area lies within a wider region, which itself is the subject of a ‘Focus on’ Companion Guide – for information about ‘Focus on’ Companion Guides, click here.

Each Interactive Checklist has a number of important features, including:

– A listing of all the bird species that are regularly present in the local area that is the subject of the checklist

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

– Spotlighted species that have a restricted range within the ‘Focus on’ region, 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 INTERACTIVE CHECKLIST eBook you will find the following sections:

CHECKLIST – a list of all birds that are recognized as species in the IOC bird list and which are regularly present for at least a part of each year in the local area

TAXONOMIC 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

INTRODUCED AND OTHER SPECIES – birds that may be regularly encountered in the wild but which are not native to the local area, 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