| A Naturalist’s Guide to the Birds of Vietnam | Nguyen Hoai Bao, Nguyen Hao Quang, Yong Ding Li & Geoffrey Davison | John Beaufoy Publishing | 2025 | Paperback | 176 pages ~300 colour photos | ISBN: 9781912081417
The Publisher’s View:
A Naturalist’s Guide to the Birds of Vietnam is a photographic identification guide to 280 bird species commonly seen in Vietnam, and is perfect for resident and visitor alike. High-quality photographs from Vietnam’s top nature photographers are accompanied by detailed species descriptions, which include common, scientific and vernacular names, size, distribution, habits and habitat. The user-friendly introduction covers geography and climate, vegetation and habitats. Also included is an all-important checklist of all of the birds of Vietnam encompassing, for each species, its common and scientific name as well as its vernacular name, its status in each state as well as its global IUCN status.
The Authors:
Nguyen Hoai Bao teaches ornithology at the Vietnam National University. He has more than 25 years’ experience working in wildlife conservation and has collaborated as a Vietnamese bird expert for Birdlife International, WWF, WCS, IUCN and International Crane Foundation to study bird ecology and status in Southeast Asia. Bao has been a professional birding guide since 1998. He developed the birdwatching app, “Vietnam Bird Guide”.
Nguyen Hao Quang is an ornithologist with an interest in forest birds. Working with WildTour, he has led many bird tours across Vietnam. He researched Vietnam’s pheasants and partridges during his studies at the Vietnam National University. He currently leads the Mekong Shorebird Conservation Project.
Yong Ding Li completed his doctorate in biodiversity conservation at the Australian National University. He currently coordinates BirdLife International’s work on migratory bird conservation in Asia. He has worked extensively in the region and is the author of The 125 Best Bird Watching Sites in Southeast Asia.
Geoffrey Davison spent all his working life in Southeast Asia, as a university lecturer in Malaysia, a conservationist with WWF, and then with the National Parks Board, Singapore. His interests range across ornithology, tropical forest ecology and animal taxonomy. He has written numerous scientific papers as well as books.
Fatbirder View:
I don’t want to damn with faint praise and I’m keeping this review short. I’d dub this one ‘fit for purpose’. It’s a handy guide to the commoner birds of Vietnam and will serve perfectly well for the resident or traveller that likes to know what they have seen, but not for full-on birders.
The text is adequate, in fact rather good for its succinct size of entries. The introductory pages are a good intro to the traveller too (not that I’ve been lucky enough to have been there… but have birded a little in China, Thailand etc., close enough for some species to be very familiar.
The pictures are good quality although, as with any such guide the size of the book means detail is lost. There are some advantages for the casual users, it’s certainly pocket sized and robust and doesn’t confuse by showing scarcer species etc.
However, regular readers will know that I am not fond of photo-guides because they most often show just one portrait so, gender, age, season and other variations are not shown. It’s impossible too, to photograph every bird in the same light, from the same angle etc. Moreover, there are no side-by-side distribution maps either. Yes, the text does talk about habitat and habit, but knowing where birds are likely is also crucial to ID efforts.
To me, photo-guides are the equivalent of IKEA putting a photo of a set of shelves in the flat-pack and expects that to be enough to figure out which screw is size ‘A’ and which is size ‘B’, and where they go.
Fatbirder