Guide to the Birds of China

I’m somewhat attached to the oriental region and as such a keen observer of the field guide market.
I was looking forward to this brand new book but I am a little disappointed. I will say that this book is probably still the most comprehensive travel companion for the country but I’m not impressed by the layout at all. It requires a constant going back and forth through pages because plates and descriptions are not next to each other, as you would expect with any field guide coming out these days. The quality of the plates varies significantly and hasn’t really progressed from the 2001 guide, IMHO. I personally don’t love the “old-school“ approach of using pointers in the plates to highlight key differences between species. Some expected mistakes pop up, e.g. Sillem’s Rosefinch in the description turns into Sillem’s Mountain Finch on the plate, Nonggang Babbler has been confirmed in N Vietnam and is not a maybe anymore.
I do like the QR codes for bird calls and the fact that it does seem to be comprehensive. If you’re travelling to China and are not put off by the annoying layout and inconsistent quality of artwork this will be the book for you.

This book is a great update from the last version (from 2000), especially in plates like the Phylloscopus warblers that are actually identifiable in this edition. Many other plates are reused from the old edition, which means they look old-fashioned and flat. There are QR codes to take you to the sounds of the birds, and in general, this is a great step forward compared to other books available for China. However, the layout of this book is incomprehensible. Instead of the usual way field guides are arranged with text-facing illustrations, the editors of this book decided to mix text and plates so that some spreads are the standard text-facing-illustrations, some are just text, some are mainly text with one or two illustrations at the bottom, and some spreads are all illustrations. In almost all cases, it didn't have to be this confusing as the plates could have been rearranged.

Moreover, they add to this confusion by not giving PAGE NUMBERS in the index. Instead, the numbers given are the individual bird number (which serves no purpose as all birds are named on the plates) and the plate number, which is hidden near the spine of the book for all plates, whereas the page number is at the outer corners and easily seen.

Finding a specific bird thus means flipping through the book and looking at the bird numbers, which are not in order on the plates. For instance, plate 130 starts at the upper left with bird 1144, and ends at the lower right with bird 1145, between which are 1146–1151 (1151 is also duplicated on the next page for no clear reason). This may be okay for small groups, where all birds in a family are on the same plate, but on other plates, you need to go back and forth trying to find your bird. For instance, plate 98 starts at the upper left with bird 833, and ends at the lower right with bird 850, but birds 835–844 are on another plate! Within a plate, there is no correspondence between bird number and where they are located on the plate; for instance on plate 103, with the difficult-to-tell-apart grey-crowned warblers, the bird are arranged 886-880-882-884-887-885-883-889-888-881, rather than placing the birds in numerical order or at least in some way that is consistent with the order of species in the text (which, incidentally, is overleaf).

If you find the text, there is no reference to which plate this bird is on. Sure, it is listed at the top which plates have illustrations of the birds on that page, but not for individual birds. For instance, the tits listed on page 261 are said to be on plates 89, 90, and 91, but it does not say which bird is where, meaning more unnecessary flipping. In this case, they don't even appear in any kind of order, as bird 759 is on plate 89, birds 760–761 on plate 91, 762–763 are on plate 90.

In other cases, the text is far removed from the plates and not in a consistent way; for instance, the cormorants (only one of which species is illustrated fully) are on plate 21, page 65, but the text doesn't appear until page 69, after plate 22.

These layout decisions are incomprehensible, and detract a lot from the use of this book outside the office.

There are a lot of smaller issues as well, like how the plate for Hodgson's hawk cuckoo is unnamed, the flying breeding-plumage Ross's gull is partially hidden behind the background of the flying 1st winter, and the lack of the distal tail of the flying Black-winged kite, but these are minor issues compared to the bizarre layout choices.

In all, it is a good book for people who like turning pages, but not a good book for birdwatchers who may want to find the correct information before the bird flies away. Still, due to the paucity of bird books for China, it is, unfortunately, the best book for the country out there.