Review: Lyn Mair

Birds of Greater Southern Africa, by Keith Barnes, Terry Stevenson and John Fanshaw; illustrated by John Gale and Brian Small, with Faansie Peacock illustrating the lark complex (Helm Field Guides)

This importan and ambitious new field guide to the birds of greater Southern Africa offers much more than a quick ID with distribution maps.

It covers a huge area from the southern tip of Africa to the entire countries of Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa with Lesotho and Eswatini.

Also included are the waters of the Mozambique Channel with Europa Island, and the African part of the Southern Ocean with its many islands including Gough, the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, and Marion and Prince Edward islands.

Angola has not been included as it is a massive country ranging from the arid Namib Naukluft on the border with Namibia all the way to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with its vast lowland equatorial forests.  As Angola has only recently started welcoming visitors there is much to discover about the avifauna of the country and it is possible that Keith Barnes and colleagues are working on it to make a stand alone bird guide to Angola adding in at least another 200 species more than the GSA book.

In an interview with Barnes on BirdLife South Africa, he emphasised he wants you to look at and understand the birds with all their variations and not simply look and tick them off your list.

The best way to start is to read the first 32 pages of the introduction as the many and varied biomes and habitats within this vast region are explained in detail, accompanied by simple drawings with a small human figure to give the scale.

Maps are also shown and all this gives you a feel for the varied habitats as the differing landscapes and topography are described.

Some other topics covered in the introduction include species variation, seasonality and nomadism.

Migration in its different forms is discussed – elevational, seasonal, intra-African and Palearctic. It’s worth reading the species accounts and plates section to understand why there are a few differences to the purely taxonomical order used in many other field guides.

Conservation and citizen science is also covered.

This book represents 1172 species, plus 26 vagrant species that might one day be seen within Southern African waters, with many and varied illustrations and a succinct text.

The two main artists have given conformity to the pages and Faansie Peacock has specialised in illustrating the lark species.

The excellent illustrations show the various stages from juvenile to adult, which can take several years for many eagles as well as the larger seabirds, and the flight patterns from above and below. All the variations from breeding to non-breeding, male and female are clearly shown for all the species.

The text and the illustrations give much detailed information on plumage variants of the species, sub species and races. Status and habitat are discussed and voice descriptions and the variations are explained.

There is also more information at the back of the book with plates for some penguins, island endemics, and Atlantic island finches that have only subtle differences.

Then there is a vagrants watchlist for any birds that may one day be seen in those far off southern waters.

The various checklists show the birds of the Southern Oceans, the endemics to greater Southern Africa, and then the important bird areas in each country.

It’s a fairly heavy, chunky book but if you are travelling, so much better to have one good book than several – anyway any bird guides to Zambia, Malawi or Mozambique are very out of date.

For a birder or anyone interested in birds travelling to adjacent countries beyond the borders of the South African, this is a must-have gem of a book.