Garrigues and Dean, Costa Rica

The plates in even the best Neotropical field guides have tended to resemble nothing so much as a crowded museum case, bird after unmoving bird posed on make-believe perches, all facing the same direction, many of them distinguishable only by the discreet numbers keyed to the facing-page captions. The pleasingly painted images by Dana Gardner in Stiles and Skutch’s Costa Rica, a pioneering guide fast approaching the 20th anniversary of its publication, are no exception, some plates crowding together nearly 30 tiny pictures (the average human thumbnail, for example, is more than enough to entirely conceal the Slaty-breasted Tinamou on Plate 12).

            To birders in northern North America and Europe, such a design lends an old-fashioned air to even the most accurate and authoritative field guides to tropical birds; it has been decades since even the venerable Peterson guides abandoned the old plates-in-the-center model, and no author and no publisher would dare even to suggest a field guide where text and plates did not face each other conveniently across the book gutter.

            Richard Garrigues and Robert Dean have collaborated in the first serious attempt to treat Neotropical birds in a readily portable illustrated volume on the new model, where a single opening presents the user with text, map, and illustration for the species in question. The result, their new Birds of Costa Rica, is a handy little book indeed, one that will prove useful for most birders visiting Costa Rica or the highlands of western Panama.

            The convenience of the facing-page format, of course, does not come without a cost. The texts in this new volume are greatly abbreviated, and though they do offer, in admirable compression, a listing of important field marks, habitat and elevation preferences, and (with the inscrutable exception of such vocal groups as terns and swifts) descriptions of typical vocalizations, there is still a great deal of helpful identification information that has had volens nolens to be omitted. As a result, the book works wonderful well for species or plumages that are highly distinctive, but will likely be less useful in facing the more subtle identification challenges posed, for example, by dowitchers or the trickier furnariids or many tyrant flycatchers.

            A further economy of space is achieved by omitting from the body of the text (but including in the full list of Costa Rica birds given in an appendix) most true deepwater pelagics and the three Cocos Island endemics. The book does, however, treat a dozen birds whose first occurrences in Costa Rica postdate the publication of Stiles and Skutch, including newly recorded accidentals and such apparently expanding species as Southern Lapwing and Shiny Cowbird. Garrigues and Dean also describe, but do not illustrate, the mysterious Alfaro’s Hummingbird, known from a single female specimen and widely believed to be a nonce hybrid or an aberrant Steely-vented Hummingbird.

            Obviously, as the author and illustrator make explicit in their Introduction, this book will stand or fall on the quality of its paintings. They are for the most part quite good, especially the passerines, many of which—the wrens, for example, or certain of the suboscines incertae sedis—appear in paintings that are not just accurate but of a terrifically welcome size unheard of in other Neotropical field guides. Some of the non-passerines are less successful; Dean’s ducks float too high in the water, and some of them (along with the grebes) have oddly serpentine necks or unusually bulging heads, while his Calidris sandpipers are uncharacteristically thin and fine-billed. The Amazona parrots are depicted in flight only from above, a failing nearly pandemic in field guides to the American tropics and a continual source of frustration to visiting birders.

            A very useful set of paintings, reaching over no fewer than 8 introductory pages, introduces less experienced birders to the technical terms of avian topography (here labeled “anatomy”). The terms given here are up to date and accurate, and the arrow used to locate a given feature in the illustration is always correctly and precisely placed. Less helpful, even potentially misleading, is a set of two plates at the back of the book depicting raptors in flight from below. Not only do the images show only adult birds (thus duplicating, for many species, the treatment in the main plates), but all are reproduced at the same scale. Such a technique can be very instructive when used carefully (as in Liguori’s Hawks from Every Angle), but the depiction here of 32 different species as if they were all of the same size is merely confusing, and birders unfamiliar with most of the raptors illustrated here would do well to remove these pages (which are blank on the back in any case).

            The book concludes with a short and useful glossary; my only complaint here is the authors’ preference for the term “striped” over the more frequently used and more widely understood “streaked.” This lexicon is followed by a taxonomic concordance to Stiles and Skutch, making it easy for readers to consult both books together; a complete list of the birds reliably reported for Costa Rica precedes separate indices of English and scientific names, the latter by genus name only.

            This book will not replace Stiles and Skutch, or any of the other “full-size” guides to the birds of Central and South America. But it does provide, in an attractive and easily portable format, much of the information necessary to identify many of the birds of Costa Rica, and birders new to the Neotropics and more experienced observers alike will be grateful for a handy introductory work and aide-mémoire to one of the most fascinating avifaunas anywhere in the world.

WINGS offers tours to Costa Rica in March and in November, as well as a late spring butterflies and birds trip.