Which bird field guide do I need to purchase for the country I have decided to go to next?The staff of Birding Ecotours have put together an informative and useful blog that is freely available to birders.The big question that all birders have to ask repeatedly (some lucky ones more so than others) is “which is the best bird field guide for the country I have just now decided to visit”? Being serious world birders themselves, the Birding Ecotours team have pooled their first-hand knowledge and generated an article that answers exactly this question. The answer to this question “Which field guide do I need to purchase for my trip?” is now made very easy: the article at http://birdingecotours.com/blog//?cat=recommended-bird-field-guides-for-the-7-continents summarises the pertinent information all in one simple site. There are a plethora of field guides out there, but not all of them are the best for the particular country you might be visiting. This blog site discards all but the top field guide (or two if there are in fact two comparably good guides) for each country.The blog site (shown at the above URL) is divided into seven sections, one for each continent. How to use the blog is very simple – if you’re visiting West Papua, for example, all you need to do is go into the link shown above, click on Australasia and find the destination you’re going to. In this case, you’ll then find that the blog authors recommend the hot off the press new book shown here:[Birds of New Guinea. This guide is awaiting the second edition, which will be coming out hopefully soon.] And, the blog site also feature some plates from the book, in this instance: [field_guinea_Plate_060_REV] [field_guinea_Plate_099]Interestingly, not all the books recommended in this blog are brilliantly top-class field guides. A great many of them (such as the above example) most definitely are absolutely first class. But, quite simply, some countries are just not covered by superlative field guides. In those cases, the blog recommends the best available for wherever you have decided to go.There are certain regions, for example Zambia, that do not have their own field guides, yet recommendations for those countries are still made on this blog. For Zambia, the best option is to use the sub-Saharan Africa guide shown in the blog: this awesome book covers a vast tract of the world’s second largest continent. It makes birding in Zambia slightly trickier because one has to sift through a myriad of irrelevant paintings of species not occurring in Zambia, but at least you can rest assured that each and every Zambian bird species will be included in the suggested book for that country. Even White-chested Tinkerbird is illustrated, in fact! This tiny bird is a would-be Zambian endemic enigmatically known only from a single specimen!The blog has been in draft form for several months, simply because the Birding Ecotours team truly needs, and humbly asks for, feedback and comments as a field guide recommendation site is always a work in progress.Why was this blog written? Because this is one of the most frequently-asked questions in the birding world: “I have booked onto a tour to country X and I want to know what field guide to get”. It’s an amazingly useful summary that every birder should know about.