A Travel and Site Guide to Birds of Costa Rica with Side Trips to Panama and Nicaragua

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Assuming a knowledge of individual species on the part of the reader,
this guide offers useful advice on where to go and what birds one might
expect to see in specific localities in Costa Rica, with briefer
treatment of possible side trips to Panama and Nicaragua.

The book is well illustrated with maps and drawings. Numerous lists of
birds sighted by the author in each area are included. (Having checked
the list of birds I saw in 1991 with those Sekerak has seen, I found
that our lists corresponded reasonably well, even though our visits
rarely coincided in terms of season.) Birding is, of course, a chancy
business—that is one of its fascinations—and Sekerak was obviously
unlucky in the Braulio Carrillo National Park. Still, he has
conscientiously appended a list of the more interesting birds from the
official park list, many of which I saw.

The one unfortunate feature of the book is the absence of an index.
While the indexing of each bird species would doubtless have been
impractical, an alphabetical listing of places would have made the book
much easier to use. However, it is an extremely useful book to take to
Costa Rica along with Stiles and Skutch’s indispensable Guide to the
Birds of Costa Rica. Even if one goes on a guided tour, it will prove
useful for its regional listings. Moreover, birders keen to track down
elusive species will find the list of “Costa Rican Bird
Specialities” especially valuable, since it shows where one is most
likely to find them and calculates the degree of difficulty in locating
them.