Americas : Birds of Southern South America and Antarctica Collins Illustrated Checklist
A Wildlife Guide to Chile: Continental Chile, Chilean Antarctica, Easter Island, Juan Fernandez Archipelago | 
 | 60% Recommended by our customers.
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Manufacturer: Harpercollins Pub Ltd
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List Price: $35.00
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 A mandatory book for South American birders
De la Peña & Rumboll's "Birds of Southern South America and Antarctica" is a well illustrated field book with more than 1,000 species of birds from Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Bolivia, plus Antarctica. Easy to use and carry in the field, one can identify any species fast, being either a male, a female or a juvenile in many cases. Illustrations from Non-Passerine birds are more accurate than Passerine birds. Each plate has the English vernacular name, the latin name and some key informations about the bird sighted as colors (male and female, whether this is the case), habitat and even vocalization in some cases. Unfortunately, the distribution maps for all species are useless and should come after the description of any bird. Despite of the maps, this book is really a good purchase, a mandatory book for South American birders.
 Great field guide for Argentina and neighboring countries.
This field guide was an excellent addition to our trip to Argentina (Buenos Aires and Iguazu Falls National Park). It is easy to transport in a backpack (small and not too heavy) and the color plates make it relatively easy to identify the birds we saw. In addition, the geographic plates were useful so we could determine if the birds were usually found in the regions we visited. Furthermore, the names were given in both English and Spanish which made communicating with the local guides much easier. I highly recommend this field guide to anyone traveling in southern South America.
Not too bad considering
There is no bird guide specific to Paraguay which is where I'm going. This guide is not up to Sibley or Peterson standards but is better than nothing. There are maps for each species,color pictures and a brief description of the bird. I am going through the book and marking species I expect to see to make it easier to use in the field.
Excellent images
It has high quality images of birds. It only have family classification, for biolohist it could have the order classification. It is a small book which is good to carry.
Fills a vital need
We travelled down the coast of South America and on to the Antarctic Peninsula, then back up the South Atlantic via the Falkland Islands to debark the cruise ship at Buenos Aires. We then spent a month birding Argentina. We practically wore this book out, as it is the only one with such breadth as to cover most of that journey; otherwise we'd have needed a library weighing tens of kilos and costing hundreds of dollars. The book is laid out well, and although we had an initial objection to the range maps being in a separate section, this feature turned out to be quite useful, since we could quickly rule out related species due to range by quick view of a single page.
The illustrations are not of the quality one associates with a book from Sibley, Peterson, or Ridgely, but in most cases they were adequate for ID. I'd recommend this book to anyone visiting multiple countries in South America, especially if you are lucky enough to be able to cross to Antarctica.
The book is somewhat out of date as to naming and Taxonomy, but that is to be expected from the date of publishing. I'd buy a more recent edition in a minute.
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