This is a great new field guide to the birds of Costa Rica. Although not as comprehensive as the venerable Stiles & Skutch, it packs over 820 species into a pocket-sized guide. The illustrations by Robert Dean are beautifully rendered and seem quite accurately done (experts on CR birds can chime in to confirm or refute this assertion). I also love that the illustrations are large in size, instead of the tiny pictures that are sometimes packed into neotropical field guides.

The layout of this guide is also different from most large-format Latin American field guides. Instead of a couple of dozen separate color plates in the center of the book like Stiles & Skutch, this new book has illustrations on every right-hand page (166 plates in all), with a short description of the bird on the facing (left) page. The descriptive info is brief, but often includes important field marks, habitat, and vocalizations. I also love the inclusion of range maps on the same page, a cool feature missing from most of the other Costa Rica field guides.

Overall, this book does not have the comprehensive scope of Stiles & Skutch, but it delivers what it promises — a pocket-sized (well, 7.5″ x 5″ x 1″), beautifully illustrated field guide focusing on field identification. I have three bird field guides for CR, and already this one is my favorite.