Book Review Birds of Ghana
By Nik Borrow & Ron Demey – (2010)
352 pages; matt art paper, with 145 colour plates of nearly 2000 illustrations and 2 main maps.
Soft Cover: 21.5cm x 14cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4081-2279-2
Christopher Helm London
For anyone with an interest in birds, especially African birds, this is a good book and worth buying. It deals specifically with Ghana and neighboring Togo, however many of the 758 species are found elsewhere in Africa and other continents. There are no colour photos, but all 758 species are excellently illustrated with nearly 2000 colour drawings, which are often better than photos anyway for fine detail.
Each species has its local common name, scientific name and some basic height and wing span measurements. It then goes onto a more detailed description of adults and juveniles, with good notes on habitat followed by voice calls.
Africa has many amazing birds with quite a number endemic to the continent and not to mention it has many other species and races of other globally distributed groups such as hornbills, rollers, bee-eaters, sun birds, barbets etc. which do not occur elsewhere and for anyone wanting to help fill some of those literature gaps on a specific group/s of birds, will certainly find this book quite useful.
Overall this is a nice and handy book with my only real criticism being the lack of detail of species distribution. There is no reference of distribution other than a small map of Ghana and Togo opposite each species with an approximate area of distribution colour shaded within each map. There is no indication of other countries where it/they do occur.
I appreciate this book deals specifically with Ghana and Togo, however, one of my pet ‘dislikes’ whether it be fauna or flora, are books which do not list or mention distribution outside the subject area of the book and or are not uniform in the data provided throughout the book. Just because a book may be dealing with a specific area that is no reason not to at least briefly mention (even a broad addition e.g. “also throughout Western Africa, Asia or North America” etc.) where else a species may or does occur and by not including such information, is not so helpful.
Rod Rice
Principal Reviewer
Nature & Travel Books