A Guide to the Birds of Fiji and Western Polynesia

‘A Guide to the Birds of Fiji and Western Polynesia including American Samoa, Niue, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Wallis and Futuna’ By Dick Watling

Hard Cover; 16 Full Colour Plates; Figures, Tables & Maps; 272 pages.

‘A Guide to the Birds of Fiji and Western Polynesia’ is a completely revised and reformatted edition of the widely acclaimed ‘Birds of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa’ and includes, in addition, the atoll nations of Tuvalu and Tokelau. A5-sized, the guide is handy for field use with detailed species accounts for the 173 species with confirmed records in the region and notes on a further 22 species with unconfirmed records.

Every breeding bird and regular migrant is illustrated on sixteen full-colour plates. The guide has the most detailed and accurate distributional coverage of the region’s birds and an up-to-date checklist for each of the countries covered. Included too is a comprehensive listing of local bird names to assist birders at the community level.

Encouraging conservation of birds is a specific objective of the book, and so in a chapter `Conservation’ current information on the conservation status of the region’s avifauna is provided with an overview of past and present threats, and priority conservation needs. Another chapter ‘Ornithology of the Region: an Overview’ provides an informative background to the study of the region’s birds.

Small though they may be, the islands of the region have plenty to offer the interested birder with 54 endemic or near-endemic species (and over 100 endemic subspecies). How to best see these and the other birds is fully covered in a chapter ‘Birding in the Region’.