An Illustrated Field Guide to the Fauna of Sri Lanka, Volume 9: Birds

About this book

Language: English

From the preface:

"An Illustrated Field Guide to the Fauna of Sri Lanki, Volume 9: Birds is the second of a series of field guides, which focuses on the amazing wild life of Sri Lanka. The stimulus for this volume was due to the success of the first book, An Illustrated Guide to the Fauna of Sri Lanka, Volume 1: Butterflies.

This field guide aims to provide easy identification and give an idea on what to look for in observed habitats or regions. It covers 479 recorded species in Sri Lanka, almost the entirety of the bird fauna in the island. This includes 237 species of birds that are known to breed in Sri Lanka, of which 27 are endemic and 6 are proposed endemic. The remaining 242 species are migrants of which 124 species are encountered rarely and therefore considered as vagrants.

This guide focuses mainly on the general introduction to birds. The first section is dedicated to introduction, the geography and life history of the birds of Sri Lanka. The second section is the main body of the guide, that illustrates 479 species of birds. All illustrations are in colour and carefully designed to show all significant and distinct plumage of each bird. All distinct features of plumages such as the breeding, non-breeding and the juvenile of many species of birds are given, where possible. A limited number of groups, mainly gulls, display many plumages between juvenile and the adult. Many of them take several years to develop a full adult plumage and pass many semi adult stages. Where it is relevant, important colour variations or morphs are also shown. The principal birds on each page are painted to a standard scale, but flight and other behavioral sketches are shown on variable and smaller scales. The Third section describes habitat, status, distribution and nesting of each bird. The majority of birds have more than one English, Sinhala and Tamil name. All these are included under the common name."

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