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Under The Microscope

THE HANDGUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF NEW ZEALAND by Hugh Robertson and Barrie Heather; Penguin, 1999; 168 pp; $29.95

Reviewed by Gareth Wilson

This kind of book is rather difficult to review. The only real test is to actually go out and do some bird watching. I've never done this before, but luckily I live close to a river with lots of bird life.

Flipping through the book idly, the first thing I noticed was how comprehensive it seemed to be. Every New Zealand bird, whether native or introduced, seems to be included. There's wild turkeys in the North Island, petrels that stay mostly in Antarctica, and tropical birds that make fleeting visits from Polynesia. There's even a special colour plate devoted to extinct birds, at least those with sightings recent enough so they might not be extinct after all.

As well as these exotica, the treatment of common birds is good. The first river birds I saw were a group of mallards and grey ducks. Derek Onley's excellent illustrations let me distinguish between them, not only the males but also the more subtly coloured females. Robertson and Heather's text descriptions are useful too, placing special emphasis on the distinguishing characteristics of each bird. I particularly liked the description of the New Zealand scaup as having a "rubber duckie" profile.

With the help of this book, I managed to identify 14 different species in my two-hour walk, and I recommend it to any active birdwatcher.

I do have a few quibbles, though. If you can't roughly identify the taxonomic group of an unknown bird, you're reduced to flipping at random through the pages while your target ducks underwater or flies away. And for all its implicit claim to completeness, it doesn't list the black-and-white geese that I found hanging around a bridge. To be fair I've only ever seen two of them, so they may have escaped from a farm purely to irritate me.

Gareth Wilson graduated from Canterbury University with a Master's Degree in Chemistry in 1997 and is studying at Christchurch Polytechnic for a diploma in Laboratory Technology.