Book Review: Habitats of Africa : A Field Guide for Birders, Naturalists and Ecologists
Habitats of Africa: A Field Guide for Birders, Naturalists, and Ecologists, by Ken Behrens, Keith Barnes and Iain Campbell, is the first field guide to cover all of Africa’s major land habitats. It should be required reading for Mammalwatching 101.
It pains me to admit this, but birders have understood much longer than I have the importance of using habitat to search for particular species. When it comes to targeting mammals I have tended to rely on range maps (usually very crude) and previous records. This can work well enough for larger species but for smaller mammals in particular there is often a very large gap in knowledge about where species occur, simply because no survey work has been done. So range maps – often constructed as a dot to dot from a handful of widely dispersed records – can be next to useless.
There is, however, often a better understanding of the habitats many species prefer. And so learning to search using a habitat frame of reference can be effective.
Knowing the name of the particular habitat preferred by a particular species is not the same as recognising that habitat when you see it. I can tell a desert from a rainforest. But what about Afroparamo from Montane Heath? I have no idea.
And trying to understand the differences between similar habitats will often mean reading a long list of the plants and trees found in each. Here I fail even more miserably. I can tell a tree from a bush … actually, wait. …I probably can’t. When does a bush become a tree?
So this book is a fabulous resource if you are as ignorant as me: it is packed with pictures and plain language that does not require a botany degree to decipher.
Each of the 85 major habitat types comes with a summary then more detailed description, followed by the wildlife you can expect to see and where to find the habitat itself. And there are hundreds of pictures including many from people who are regulars on this site.
It must have been a mammoth effort for the three authors to produce all 450 pages, yet Keith Barnes is still smiling and rightly so.
Although it will be of interest to all naturalists I was delighted to read that it is written with a ‘mammal and bird lens’ (in that order – quite right Keith Barnes, quite right!).
Keith Barnes., co-author or the book and mammalwatcher
So if you are planning to mammalwatch in Africa and want a crash course in habitats and how to use them, look no further.
Habitats of Africa is available from Princeton Press and elsewhere.
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