cheap books on Natural History

"A Field Guide to the Birds of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali" - MacKinnon

I'll need a bird book for Indonesia sometime soon. Is this the one I want?
 
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Thanks for the information.
I've looked at the thread on BirdForum and I will get the Simpson and Day one for now since it's on sale and looks pretty good for what I need.
 
FunkyGibbon said:
"A Field Guide to the Birds of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali" - MacKinnon

I'll need a bird book for Indonesia sometime soon. Is this the one I want?
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that one will be good for western Indonesia, for the east (including Sulawesi) you would want The Birds of Wallacea but it is out of print and ridiculously expensive when you can get copies.

If you are just going to Borneo though, there are two field guides specifically for that island.
 
Chlidonias said:
that one will be good for western Indonesia, for the east (including Sulawesi) you would want The Birds of Wallacea but it is out of print and ridiculously expensive when you can get copies.

If you are just going to Borneo though, there are two field guides specifically for that island.
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The book I used on Borneo was Phillipps' Field Guide to the Birds of Borneo. I thought this was fantastic, although I didn't look at any specific rivals to this. I bought this on Borneo for about 100MYR, which is fairly cheap. I think it might be more expensive purchased online.

Just this month a companion book was released - Phillipps’ Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo. This seems like a great book, but I haven't seen it in person.
 
Thanks guys. I'll be getting that, Samson and Day, and the Illustrated Guide to Primates as well. My current plan involves getting a little east of Bali to Flores, as well as Borneo and Java, but hopefully I can use MacKinnon with some success there too.
 
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Bloody book sales! I spent around $400 last before it ended (and half of them weren't even discounted!).

:p

Hix
 
A bargain for chimp lovers

I saw a copy of 'Tales from Gombe' ( Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers, 2014) at a bookshop yesterday - don't know how I had missed it before. It's a large coffee-table book with splendid photos and plenty of text about the chimps of the Gombe Stream in Tanzania, where Jane Goodall started her research when I was a boy. I was impressed, but I thought £40 was rather steep.
However I noted it was published by the Natural History Museum, so I checked their website and found it on sale at half price (plus reasonable p&p). It should arrive next week :)

Tales from Gombe | Natural History Museum Online Shop

Alan
 
Over the weekend, I purchased 'Phillipp's Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and their Ecology' while at Birdfair. It is a superb book, that contains not only drawings of all the major land mammals of Borneo (including some from surrounding islands and even a few Pleistocene species) but also depictions or descriptions of all manner of interesting hypotheses, such as blue-headed pittas having bold colouration to advertise themselves as leech-pickers to large mammals, red langur colouration as a mimicry of orangutans and the sculptor squirrel as a specialist latex feeder. Also very interesting was an initial chapter about the relationships between mammals and fruiting plants. I thoroughly recommended this book.

Phillipps' Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and their Ecology: Quentin Phillipps, Karen Phillipps: NHBS
 
Chlidonias said:
did you go to Jon Hall's mammal-watching talk?
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Unfortunately not - I spent most of Friday at Birdfair and we spent the Saturday elsewhere around Rutland Water. I didn't even realise he was doing a talk, if I had I would have probably stayed.
 
There's a load of really great books in the NHBS backlist bargains sale that are discounted until the end of March.

I just spent £15 each on Primates of the World and Mammals of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and I would have bought a load more, but I ran out of money. :p
 
The description on NHBS as "An indispensable reference" made me wonder if it was actually a field guide, but for £25 discounted to £17, how big can it be? I think I'm going to get it anyway though.
 
LaughingDove said:
The description on NHBS as "An indispensable reference" made me wonder if it was actually a field guide, but for £25 discounted to £17, how big can it be? I think I'm going to get it anyway though.
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googling the shipping weight I got 1.4kg for the Australian guide - for a comparison for you, googling the field guide for southeast Asian mammals by Charles Francis gives a weight of less than 1kg.
 
And since I would consider the Francis book barely light enough to use as a field guide, the Australian one is definitely a reference book. Sounds like good value then.
 
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