WHAT BIRD IS THAT?

Revised and Updated Edition

by NEVILLE W CAYLEY

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New large hardcover book, published 2011, 832 pages, with 460 full-page colour plates. Measures 29 x 21 cm. Includes bookmarks, a presentation bookplate and a voucher with a unique product code to download the e-book 'What Bird Call is That' for free.

With hundreds of beautiful and accurate illustrations, distribution maps, concise species notes and an easily accessible arrangement by habitat, this revised and updated version of Australia's classic bird guide will once again become and indispensible family reference and inspire a new generation to identify, admire and protect our unique and often vulnerable birdlife.

Some background to this iconic book:

What Bird is That? A Guide to the Birds of Australia was first published in 1931 by Angus & Robertson in Sydney. Written and illustrated by Neville William Cayley, it was Australia’s first fully illustrated national field guide to birds. In 1960 it was rated the all-time best seller in Australian natural history. Cayley’s aim in creating this work was to make available a book that would encourage and help people to learn about and appreciate Australia’s remarkable and unique bird life. He saw and responded to a need for a simple book that was accessible to the non-specialist birdwatcher. Each species was illustrated in colour and the birds were organised according to their usual habitat. The accompanying text included brief notes on distribution, breeding and behaviour.

The first edition of What Bird Is That? contained 340 pages bound in green buckram, with a dust jacket illustrated with a painting of a Laughing Kookaburra seated on and within a large red question mark. It inclued 36 coloured plates of paintings of Australian birds by the author, as well as several black-and-white photographic plates of habitat. There were numerous reprints and revised editions in various formats produced well into the 1980s. The first edition was sponsored by the Gould League of Bird Lovers of New South Wales of which Cayley was a Council member. In return for its sponsorship, Cayley offered the Gould League four tenths of his 10% book royalty. However, initial sales were slow and in 1935 he sold his entire share to the League for £300.

The ornithologist Terence Lindsey revised Cayley’s work in the 1980s, creating the last and most significant revision of What Bird is That? It was published in 1984 and incorporated all of Cayley’s paintings created over many years, and included a revised taxonomy. In the 53 years since the first edition, more than a hundred new bird species had been identified in Australia. Scientific names had been changed and groups of birds had been reordered. Lindsey brought What Bird is That? up-to-date with the latest birding conventions of the time, as well as contributing a valuable supplementary list of birds and a scholarly catalogue of Cayley’s paintings.

This Signature Edition What Bird is That?, published by Australia's Heritage Publishing in 2011, is the latest release of Cayley’s “big bird book” complete with Terence Lindsey’s revisions. It is 832 pages, features 769 birds and includes all 460 of Cayley’s full-colour paintings, many showing groups of related birds. Included with this edition is an accompanying downloadable e-book What Bird Call is That?, which identifies and illustrates 101 birds from What Bird is That?, as well as providing sound files (provided by David Stewart) of each featured bird’s distinctive call.

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What Bird is That? Revised and Updated Edition by Neville W Cayley