The Complete Birds of the World: Every Species Illustrated

Awesome book for the bird lover in your family. Very detailed and comprehensive. We gave this as a gift, and our nephew (a professional birder) absolutely LOVED it! Worth every penny!

Great book. I love it.

My boyfriend, a bird lover, couldn't stop flipping through the pages. He carried it around with him for days. Get the book!

If you like birds this is the book for you! Beautiful pictures and a lot of great information

Great book.

I have literally hundreds of books on birds from around the world, including several from the authors of this work. I would have loved this book about 20 years ago when there was nothing like it, but now it's competing with a couple of other works that are better, in my opinion. The best is the two volume Handbook of Birds of the World (Lynx Edicions) Checklist of Birds of the World. These volumes are now slightly outdated taxonomically, as any book on birds will be with the rapidly changing taxonomy these days, but exquisite....and expensive. Now that Cornell has taken over HBW, these lovely illustrations and the information in those volumes can be found online with constantly updating taxonomy. Lynx Edicions did publish a one volume version called All the Birds of the World with the same illustrations and they are also lovely and accurate. This last volume is not substantially more expensive than the full cost of the reviewed volume ($100 or so), and has many more features. So why do I think these are better options than The Complete Birds? This is not going to be a field guide, but rather more of a coffee table or bedside reading book, so the illustrations should be the main feature. I regularly go to sleep pondering the pages of the two volume checklist above, but squinting to see the many species on one page of the Complete Birds is just not fun. I also don't like the field guides from which these illustrations were taken for the same reason. They are hard to see, and especially piled on top of each other. It would help to separate the illustrations of the families at least. Tossing the ostriches, rheas, cassowaries, etc all in one pile (along with kiwis!) makes it hard to tell how these differ. Range maps instead of tiny general word distributions are a major lack. In general, too much on each page makes it difficult to enjoy any of it. I see this as a poor economy: you're paying to see all the gorgeous details of these birds, but you can't see them because a portion of each bird is behind another one. As far as content on the species accounts go, again this is not a field guide, so why use the space for that information? Indeed, we can easily find the information stated in many places. How about what made taxonomists choose to separate a species from its similar relative? Granted, this is not the typical information found and would require quite a bit of digging in some cases, but it would not only be a unique contribution but also make it truly interesting. We can find (or see) the color on the back of a bird's neck just fine if the illustration is good enough, but maybe the average person does not know that a Grass-green Tanager, so brilliant in good light and at eye level, is virtually impossible to see in its typical forest habitat. So overall, it's a good effort, and a little more accessible because of a reduced cost, but if one is just looking for a coffee table book of the world's birds, there are plenty of really gorgeous books that have many if not all species. I think this one sacrifices the beauty of each species for the quantity of species. Rather, if one is looking for information on the birds of the world, with today's digital offerings, it's just more comprehensive to go online. (By the way, the Lynx Edicions' All the Birds has a link for each species to its online account which has lots of information, a feature that I find useful but somewhat esthetically compromising due to the funny little square by each illustration.)

Bought as a Christmas gift for my sister . She is a bird watcher and she loved the book

It seems that the majority of the illustrations of birds from Africa are extremely blurry/low-res. Since there are birds from Africa in the majority of the plates, there are many unfortunate instances of fantastic avian artwork juxtaposed with art so blurry that it’s comical (see photos). (Even worse are the pages focusing exclusively on African birds - these pages honestly border on ridiculous.) In the front of the book it’s explained that all of the images were sourced from other field guides published by William Collins, and all of these guides are listed - from that breakdown it’s clear that all the blurry images came from a couple of these guides. I can’t imagine how this issue got past quality control, but it’s definitely something a potential buyer will want to be aware of - it really breaks the immersion. TLDR; There’s some super blurry art in this book, and it’s not just a couple pages. To be fair, good art vastly outweighs blurry art , but maybe pass on this one if you’re passionate about African birds.

Very complete. The Bible of birds

Beautiful!! If you’re a birder you will LOVE this book. An absolute bargain at £42. Lovely illustrations and well organised. My Christmas present to myself

Muito bom, chegou rápido e em bem conservado, recomendo. (A mancha nas fotos é da câmera do meu celular)

Great reference source which I’ll be using time and time again

J'attendais depuis longtemps un livre présentant toutes les espèces aviaires connues. Voilà qu'il y en a subitement deux sur le marché. Je suis heureux d'avoir reçu «The Complete Birds of the World» le jour même de sa sortie sur le marché. J'avais déjà le premier un dérivé de la magistrale collection de Del Oyo. Les deux livres me plaisent beaucoup et c'est un délice de pouvoir voyager en imagination en les feuilletant. Les illustrations sont très bonnes en général dans ce second livre, si on excuse quelques exceptions. Évidemment, il n'aurait pas été possible de représenter tous les plumages, mais le contenu est fort substantiel.