Sharon R. Chester

Basics: 1997, spiral bound, 41 pages, 29 color plates of 300+ species, no range maps, plates only

This booklet contains nothing other than plates, a checklist of Chile’s birds, and a map of Chile naming the 12 states/regions. Except for the bird’s name in English, Spanish, and scientific, there is no text. Other descriptive information is located in the earlier field guide.

This spiral-bound booklet was created to be an illustrative supplement to the earlier book “Birds of Chile” by Araya and Chester (1993). The earlier work was a field guide with only black-and-white line drawings. This newer supplement offers 29 color plates containing over 300 species covered in the earlier field guide.

The artwork in this booklet is good, but different. It is very similar to the style used in the book “Las Aves de Chile” painted by Martinez. The birds are painted as more of a quality caricature to accentuate the key color patterns and field marks of the bird. This means realistic detail has been sacrificed. These illustrations will be helpful for identification, but quite limited without showing age or subspecies differences.

One quirk should be noted about the layout of the species. Taxonomically, many birds are jumbled around in the plates. The last plate contains the rhea, tinamous, and seed-snipes. Another plate contains hummingbirds with conebills. The plate before that contains swallows, nightjars, and woodpeckers.

Considering the superior field guides for Chile that are available today, this supplemental work and its companion field guide are probably obsolete.

I've listed several related books below...
1) The Birds of Chile by Araya/Chester
2) Birds of Chile by Jaramillo/Burke/Beadle
3) Las Aves de Chile by Martinez/Gonzalez
4) Birds of Chile and Adjacent Regions of Argentina, Bolivia and Peru -- Volumes I & II by Johnson et.al.
5) Guia de Campo de las Aves de Chile by Araya/Holman/Morales
6) Birds of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and Antarctic Peninsula by Couve
7) Birds of the High Andes by Fjeldsa/Krabbe… (lisätietoja)