Birds of the Wet Tropics of Queensland & Great Barrier Reef & Where to Find Them
Lloyd Neilsen
Second edition, 2015. Self-published, it is available from your favourite local bookshop or Neilsen’s own site.
Birds of the Wet Tropics is a field guide to 451 birds found in our region, and its unique feature is that it is arranged primarily by observable features – black plumage, red eye, forked tail, etc – rather than family and genus.
This can be enormously helpful, especially for beginners, once the user is familiar with the book. It does, however, entail considerable duplication (a red-eyed black bird with a forked tail, for instance, will appear three times), which in turn may explain the uncomfortably small text size.
Neilsen has also published The Identification Guide to the Difficult Small Birds of Australia (2021) which is exactly what it says it is. Again, it is available on his own site.
Some birders may find Difficult Small Birds even more useful than his bigger book; I know I do, because the bigger one carries much the same information as other field guides in my collection (Menkhorst, Slater) but I can turn to this book when they fail me. It would have been very useful, for instance, in identifying this little brown bird.
The illustrations in both books are his own and they are very good indeed.