South America, though home to about one-third of the world's bird species and twice as many endemic families of birds as any other continent, has the world's sparsest population of birdwatchers. Birds of Southern South America and Antarctica illustrates and describes all the known species--more than 1,000 of them--in a vast swath of this underexplored birder's paradise, from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, southern Brazil, and Uruguay to parts of Antarctica. Just some of the birds it covers are teals, tinamous, chachalacas, conebills, cuckoos, macaws, parakeets, parrots,...

Here in an easy-to-use format is the first guide to the nearly 1,300 species of non-passerine South American birds. It complements Robert Ridgly and Guy Tudor's large reference volumes on the passerines (1,800 species), which will soon be available in a single-volume field guide format.

One of things that makes this book special is its use of masterful and alluring illustrations; most neotropical birders will want the book for the illustrations alone. The text concentrates on the key identification features of each species and follows the layout of other books in this series....