Product Description

The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals is the standard identification guide to all African land mammals. This new pocket guide is an adaptation of the original into a standard field-guide format. The greatly condensed text focuses on essential information such as identification and distribution, while the author's superb illustrations have been rearranged into an easy-to-use plate format and placed opposite the text. Complex and more obscure groups like the bats and certain rodent families are summarised by genera. This is a practical, lightweight guide, ideal for use in the field and more suitable than the original for the lay person and tourist on safari. "Excellent, comprehensive field guide so you can tell your puku from your lechwe." BBC Wildlife

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65571 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
"Excellent, comprehensive field guide so you can tell your puku from your lechwe." BBC Wildlife Magazine (Feb 2006)

About the Author
Jonathan Kingdon is one of the world's foremost authorities on African mammals, as well as an accomplished artist.

Customer Reviews

The Best Guide for Field Use in Africa!
This compact little guide is a condensed version of "The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals" (ISBN: 0713665130) by the same author. That book is easily the best overview of African mammals, with detailed info on each species/genus, but it is not really practical for use as a field guide (see my review of it).

This book contains the same illustrations arranged in a format that makes them handier for actual identification in the field.
It is very comprehensive, covering every single species of African mammals with the exception of bats, rodents, insectivores, elephant-shrews and hyrraxes, which are usually represented by one species for each genus. But every single genus is represented, and of rodents, every species of squirrel is dealt with separately.
Maps and brief info on distribution and ecology of each taxon is now to be found on the pages facing the illustrutions.
The latter are a mixed bag, as in the original work: while most are quite good, even excellent and life-like, others are quite awful, either showing animals with stiff, straight limbs/bodies as if drawn with a ruler (like the Crowned Monkey) or in highly unnatural positions (like the Potto with the limbs twisted out, or the Cheetah standing up like a circus horse).

All things considered, this is easily the best field guide to mammals of Africa, though for more in-depth information on each taxon, you may still want to have the original book in addition to this one.

Excellent but could be better!
I purchased this field guide as a companion to a week in Kruger Park, ZA. I consider myself something of a field guide 'geek' owning several dozen on various fauna, but I am far from familiar with African mammals so purchased the Kingdon guide - I would have been lost without it.

Firstly the layout of the guide and its small size were excellent - very easy to travel with and use. It was very well thumbed by the end of the week and thoroughly added to the enjoyment of my trip. It certainly helped when distinguishing genet species, antelopes as well as smaller unusual stuff like blesmols.

However there were a few 'niggles'. Firstly the text lacks alternative common names, so looking up 'grey rhebok' and 'grey duiker' got me nowhere. Grey rhebok are only listed as mountain rhebok and I am still none the wiser as to whether 'grey duiker' even appears in the guide under a synonym?

Some of the illustrations left something to be desired particularly with proportions of facial features especially on the smaller antelope and mongooses, not aiding ID.

Most frustrating though were some of the range maps. These are invaluable in a guide of this nature that covers such a large area and a diverse phylum, but several examples let me down. For example Kruger was full of ground squirrels, yet none of the species listed in the Kingdon guide has a range that includes the Kruger area. The same occurs with a monkey species I saw on the Natal coast.

Overall however the guide was excellent, it just didn't offer me the complete solution and I will be hitting the internet to ID some of the things I failed to ID in the field. I would probably have got on better with the full Kingdon guide, but as I always struggle with airline baggage limits the pocket guide was a compromise that I was forced to make.