Birds of Vietnam

This is the latest in a new series from Lynx entitled the BirdLife International Field Guides Collection. A field guide for Thailand was published last summer and soon to appear are guides to the West Indies and Japan. I was pleased to get my hands on this latest book just ahead of a recent trip to Vietnam.

Vietnam is one of the best birding destinations in Asia and a three-week trip from north to south is likely to result in a pleasing haul of around 400 species. That said, the birds are often hard to find and it is only down to the ingenuity of local bird guides that you can actually see some of the shyer laughing thrushes from temporary hides set up at feeding stations. As a result of this, anyone who visited Vietnam a few years ago may now find that several species they only have glimpsed before are now easily available for much closer scrutiny.

For almost two decades the standard bird book for Vietnam has been A Field Guide to the Birds of South-East Asia by Craig Robson (New Holland, 2000 and 2008 – now published by Bloomsbury), and although that is still a masterpiece it urgently needs updating. It lacks distribution maps, but where it is still invaluable is in illustrating a wide range of races across the region.

By comparison, this new book sometimes only shows one race when several can be found in Vietnam, although it is very good at showing approximately where each race can be found. That criticism aside, this is the first field guide dedicated to Vietnam and is really welcome. It describes and illustrates all 911 species that have been recorded in the country with colour maps for all except vagrants, and always next to the illustration rather than the text – a useful move in my view.

Texts of around 150 words per species cover status, habitat and behaviour, age, sex and geographical variation, voice, and always suggests confusion species. There are 180 colour plates with over 1900 illustrations taken from Handbook of the Birds of the World, and these include birds in flight for larger families such as waterfowl, waders and raptors, both sexes (where appropriate) and a selection of juvenile and non-breeding plumages. A total of 29 artists created these images but you would never think that because their styles have merged together very well. The layout has around six species per plate and this works well, although occasionally similar species have ended up split between two pages – for example, White-spectacled Warbler Phylloscopus intermedius which would have been better placed next to the Phylloscopus warblers that it actually looks like it rather than the ones that it does not.

Like all of the books in this new series the taxonomy used is that of BirdLife/HBW and it recognises 10 endemics and a further 27 near-endemics for Vietnam. If you follow the IOC taxonomy then you will not recognise Tonkin Partridge Arborophila tonkinensis as a species (treated by IOC as a race of Green-legged Partridge Arborophila chloropus. However you will struggle to find two IOC endemics in this book - Dalat Bush-warbler Locustella idonea and Dalat Shrike-babbler Pteruthius annamensis which BirdLife/HBW lump into Russet Grasshopper-warbler Locustella mandelli and White-browed Shrike-babbler Pteruthius aeralatus. Of course, not everyone agrees on taxonomy, but much as travelling birders love HBW, an increasing number (perhaps most) are now using the IOC list as their checklist. So it can become confusing when around up to 5% of the species are described using different names or taxonomic relationships. In most cases, this guide makes it clear when other names are in common usage – but not always.

In addition to the species pages, for those who like to seek additional information while travelling, there is a Quick Response (QR) code for each species linking to the HBW Internet Bird Collection gallery of photos, videos and sounds. There are also introductory pages outlining Vietnam’s habitats and key birding sites.

Weighing in at around 1 kg this is a very portable book and added greatly to the enjoyment of my trip, although at £50 for the softback version it is relatively expensive when you can buy second-hand copies of Robson’s guide for under £20.

Field guides for birds in Asia have come a long way since I first began to bird watch in Asia. Growing up in Sri Lanka I got off to a good start with G. M. Henry’s A Guide to the Birds of Ceylon and Dillon Ripley and Salim Ali’s Handbook of the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent in 10 volumes. For travels further east into South-east Asia, I used A Field Guide to the Birds of South-East Asia by Ben King, Martin Woodcock and E.V. Dickinson. It took nearly another three decades before this was superseded by Craig Robson’s A Field Guide to the Birds of South-East Asia in the modern format with every species illustrated in colour on plates. However, the first edition and even the updated edition in 2008 still had the plates and text in separate parts of the book as was the old custom when full colour printing across the whole book was expensive.

The Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) in 17 volumes resulted in the publisher now known as Lynx Nature books having a comprehensive suite of colour illustrations and text for every species of bird in the world. This has placed them in an ideal position to produce books which are country-specific. The field guides in this spin-off series mark an important step change in the development of bird field guides in the world and perhaps more so in part of Asia. Now for many countries we have thoroughly modern field guides with first-class illustrations with the species text on a facing page, covering the standard field guide topics on identification, distribution and behaviour. These guides are not only important as tools in the hands of scientists and conservationists but they also play an important part in the development of wildlife tourism which provides a further economic impetus to conserve the last remaining wildernesses.

As this book makes clear, Vietnam is a special place for birding with 931 species, 16 endemics and 42 near endemics. Vietnam at one time suffered from the perception that its biodiversity had been largely lost due to human pressures with forests being replaced by agricultural land. In 2006, Vietnam: A Natural History by Eleanor Janes Sterling, Martha Maud Hurley and Le Duc Minh’ sought to dispel this myth by providing a fine all-round account of its natural history and outlining many of the exciting recent discoveries of new species not alone with its flora but even with vertebrate species. Nevertheless, Vietnam continues to be still under-appreciated as a birding destination despite the efforts of people like lead author Richard Craik who has been leading birding tours in the country. However, a second edition, 6 years after the first suggests that perceptions on Vietnam’s wildlife potential is changing for the better.

The field guide follows the standard formula for field guides in the Lynx series with the text updated and supplemented by local experts, in this case Richard Craik and Lê Quý Minh. The QR codes take you to the eBird website for supplementary information, images and most usefully sound recordings from the Macaulay Library. The growth of citizen science and the wealth of information that is available now and is being continuously updated is phenomenal and is another essay in itself.

The inner front cover shows Vietnam in relation to its South-east Asian neighbours and the inner back cover marks out 18 of the top birding sites in Vietnam. The first 19 pages of the preliminary sections include an overview of the country’s recent ornithological exploration history, a geographical overview, a summary of key habitat types and a synopsis of the important birding hotspots. There is also an important note on avoiding harm to birds from tape playback and the dangers of baiting at feeding stations and photographic hides resulting in local extinction due to the illegal activity of bird trappers. Conservation in Asia is never easy and even wildlife tourism which is generally a good thing can have unintended consequences.

29 artists are credited with the illustrations, many of which first appeared in HBW. Many of the artists are household names to keen birders who know them for producing some of the finest field guide illustrations in the world. Combine that with first-class text, clear distribution maps and QR codes and you are left with an absolutely superb book. The species accounts have the families separated by a shaded header with brief details of the number of extant species in the family and that in the region. The text in addition to describing the bird’s status in Vietnam briefly outlines any subspecies in the region, followed by typical habitat, identification-oriented text, voice and also describes similar species. This is a functional book intended for field use (the flexi-cover option has a water-resistant cover). Nevertheless, I find the quality of the overall production and beauty of the artwork also lends the book a certain aesthetic appeal. But then, I enjoy the company of ornithological books and I still have in my collection the books by Ali and Ripley, King, Robson and many more from the Asian region.

Despite multiple visits to some countries in Asia and several natural history book titles on Vietnam in my book collection, I have not yet birded in Vietnam. But with this essential field guide to the birds of Vietnam on my shelf, I think it will not be long before I go to Vietnam.