As a naturalist who travels as part of my bread and cheese occupation, I am never without an optical instrument (usually a monocular or small binocular), a notebook, and a field guide to the birds (they’re the most ubiquitous and easy-to-observe natural subjects during business trips) to be found in the area though which I am sojourning. For most of the places I visit, a single field guide is sufficient to cover the area at hand; however when I travel in China, with its 1,431 species of birds to be found within its borders, no single field guide has previously been sufficient to cover the expansive area across which I must travel on my duly appointed factory-visiting rounds. Fortunately, this past January that changed with the publication of the new Birds of China by Princeton University Press in its Princeton Field Guide Series.
Written by Prof. Liu Yang and Dr. Chen Shuihua, the new Birds of China includes detailed information about all the birds of China within a single – albeit understandably large – volume. What’s more, in addition to the range maps and other expected features, each bird is identified in both English and Mandarin, with the Mandarin name also written in a simple phonetic pronunciation. As one who has not infrequently found it necessary to use a field guide to help allay suspicions of police and other officials who have stopped me to ask why I’m wandering around their country looking at things through a binocular and making notes, the ability be able to make reference in their own language to what I am looking for, or at, is a most valuable tool indeed.
I have only just received a copy of this new book, but from what I have seen even during my initial examinations of it, I am filled with anticipation about what else I shall discover among its 672 pages. I will, of course, be conveying further reports of these discoveries here in The Well-read Naturalist in the near future.
