Animal Books

Field guides, picture books and pet handbooks:

they share a shelf but rarely a buyer. Field guides are for naming what you see on a trail or from a boat, and bird guides are the heavyweights. Stiles and Skutch’s Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica, also published in Spanish as the Guía de aves de Costa Rica, is the thick, detailed classic; Garrigues and Dean’s The Birds of Costa Rica, in English or as Aves de Costa Rica, is the compact one most birders carry. Twan Leenders’ books cover frogs, snakes and lizards, and Fiona Reid’s guides do the mammals. Children’s animal books are bought for the pictures and the story, while an animal colouring book belongs with coloring books. Pet handbooks on dogs, cats and aquariums are practical manuals that date slowly. Guides to the trails and parks themselves, rather than the animals in them, sit in outdoor books.

A full bird guide, a pocket guide or a laminated sheet:

the right one depends on how seriously you will use it. A full guide is heavy to carry all day, but it settles the hard cases, the female hummingbirds and look-alike flycatchers a pocket guide leaves out. Laminated fold-out sheets survive a downpour and fit a shirt pocket, but they show only the common species: a good first buy for a family trip to Tortuguero, a poor one for anyone keeping a list. Edition matters more here than with almost any other book. The country’s official bird list is revised every few years as new species turn up and names change, so an old guide will be missing birds and will use names that no longer match the checklists and apps birders use in the field.

Old editions of Stiles and Skutch, and what used guides fetch:

a full Spanish-language bird guide costs around ₡20,000 to ₡28,000 new, and a used one with clean plates and a sound spine changes hands around ₡10,000 to ₡15,000. The discount is steepest on superseded English editions of Garrigues and Dean, because the newest one is also published as a free open-access download. Stiles and Skutch goes the other way: its Spanish edition is hard to find and its text is still the most detailed, so a clean copy holds its value better than its age suggests.

Colour plates, spines and ticked checklists:

those are what to look at in a second-hand field guide. Open the plates first. Sun fades them, damp makes them wavy and stuck together, and a guide whose colours are off is no use for telling one tanager from another. Thick glued paperbacks crack at the pages used most, and a plate that works loose is soon lost, so count them against the list of plates. Many birders tick the species they have seen in the index: in pencil it barely matters, in pen it is a matter of taste. Pirated photocopies of popular guides exist, and their plates give them away with muddy, flat colour. With children’s books, check board-book corners for chewing, count the lift-the-flaps and see whether the sticker pages have already been used.

Naturalist guides, students and the bird books they outgrow:

good used field guides usually come from a guide moving up to a newer edition, a biology student in Heredia or Turrialba finishing a fieldwork course, or a family whose children have moved on from jungle picture books. Put the author, title, edition and language in the heading, because someone weighing Stiles and Skutch against Garrigues and Dean needs to know which it is before writing to you. Photograph the copyright page, the spine and two or three plates in daylight, and say whether the index carries someone’s ticks. Anyone collecting a guide in Liberia or near Monteverde should leaf through every plate before paying, because a missing plate is the one fault that turns a field guide into a picture book.