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We love to read.
We own a lot of books.
We also own an online bookshop. Handy right?!
But we realise that not everyone has spare money right now, and when you do, there are so many books to choose from and you don't want to waste your money. So, Scott and I thought we would do a monthly book review so our customers could find out a bit more information on a particular title and decide if it was for their shelves or not.
For our eighth book review Tie shares her thoughts on their new book A Field Guide to the Snakes of Australia by Tie and Scott Eipper.
We thought for this book review it might be handy to share the differences in titles for those who are on the fence about purchasing this book because they already have A Naturalist’s Guide to the Snakes of Australia. As the titles are close, I’ll simply refer to them as the Naturalists Guide (the smaller, cheaper book only available in softcover) and the Field Guide (the larger, more expensive book that will be available soon and in hardcover).
There are quite a few massive differences on the two books. The first is obviously the price. The Naturalist Guide retails for $30 and the Field Guide retails for $70. We realise $40 doesn’t go as far as it used to, but that $40 encompasses a lot of difference and work!
Comparison of the two books together in Scott's hot little hand. The hard cover is quite a fair bit bigger when you can see them side by side.
The second is the lead author, the Field Guide is my first go at being lead, and it was quite good to be able to tell Scott what to do for a change!!! It probably won’t happen to often so I’m clinging to that for all it’s worth!
The Naturalist’s Guide is only available in paperback, has 176 pages and measures 18 x 13 x 1.1cm. The Naturalist Guide follows a format of many books done by John Beaufoy Publishing and could not be varied from this formula. The first edition was published in 2019, the second edition was published in 2022.
The Field Guide is hardcover for the first print run. Any print run done after the initial one we were told will be done in paperback. It measures 23.5 x 13.5 x 3.2cm. As there aren’t many books that John Beaufoy Publishing does this way, we were able to have free reign (for the most part!) with what we wanted to include in this book. The Field Guide has 365 pages of text, and 3 blank pages which allow you to put your own notes in – something Scott and I love in a field guide. This field guide is current, being published only a few weeks ago and to date is correct taxonomically. The Field Guide has 240 species, whilst the Naturalist Guide being current at the time only has 239 species.
As I mentioned the Naturalist Guide follows a format. This means that we were restricted by size, information and photographic references. Don’t get me wrong, for $30 the Naturalist Guide range hold a fantastic amount of information, but there was more we wanted to add. The price point of $30ish AUD for these books in the series is also fantastic. It makes the books more accessible to those who don’t actually want a book on snakes but would like to know what they could encounter on their property, on bushwalks, or even a present for those who do like snakes!
The Field Guide contains all the information we believe helpful in identifying snakes, that we weren’t able to add in the Naturalists Guide. Because we had the room, we could add a lot more to the text. The Field Guide has distribution maps, a critical feature that couldn’t be added to the smaller book due to space restrictions. Each species account has a small distribution map. It is a black and white map of Australia with each state clearly defined and the distribution of the species is clearly marked in purple.
The text size is slightly larger in the Field Guide, and we feel the font is clearer to read. (This is what happens when the older person is in charge of writing – she has bad eyesight!!) The photos also are generally larger, with most species having at least three photos. Having multiple images per species helps illustrate the variation of a species across their range. This especially helps people who are new to snake identification. The Naturalist Guide has 354 photos. The Field Guide has 1086 photos. We have tried to not reuse pictures between the two books, however there are a few species that are only known from a single specimen, so in those instances or the extremely rare snakes where only one or two people have images of these, that was unavoidable.
We were able to have a whole page for each species of snake in the Field Guide as we didn’t have the page restriction that the Naturalists Guide has. (The Naturalist Guide has for the most part, two species per page. Still packed with a lot of information in that paragraph per species, but we loved to be able to add more to that.) In the Field Guide, the most commonly encountered species has (where possible, we still had a page limit) a double page. This means on each species accounts we were able to add to the data. We were able to include more information on appearance and scalation. We were able to add a section we titled comments and were able to add (where known) shelter sites, disposition, reproduction and a little on the neonates. Each species account in the Field Guide also contains extra information such as etymology, type locality and a big one for us was pronunciation. We are asked regularly to help people pronunciate a species name, so we felt adding it in would be quite beneficial – we’ve at all at one point either completely wrecked the pronunciation and amused everyone around us or just not said it as we are in fear of messing it up!
The Field Guide also has dichotomous keys for family and genera and species to aid in identification to a subspecies level on all Australian Snakes. When we wrote the Field Guide we wanted it to be as user friendly for the beginner as it could possibly be, and keys are another tool to help aid in identification.
Each genus has a brief overview before the individual species accounts. We feel the more information we can give a reader, the better we have done our job. In this overview, we assigned a difficulty level for species identification as some species are much more difficult to tell apart within a genus than others. This can be a source of frustration to new herpers. All the venomous species have a brief overview of venom composition where known.
The Naturalist Guide and the Field Guide both have the IUCN listings for each snake. The Naturalist Guide has them in the back. So we could cram more information and pictures in, we chose to add them to the species accounts in the Field Guide. This freed up those pages so we included a checklist in the Field Guide. This checklist is a list of every species of snake, and has space for you to tick them off as you see them and a line for any notes you may wish to add next to it like location, date, time etc.
We have seen so many lists of the most venomous snakes in the world. Most of them are that far out of whack, we did our research and compiled a list of the 100 most venomous snakes by LD50. (We noticed there is an error in the list where the publisher has accidentally mixed two lines up, and we didn’t see it when we submitted the final proof – the range lines somehow got swapped between Hydrophis platurus and Notechis scutatus niger, but everything else is correct at time of print.)
In the Field Guide we had the space so we added a section on what to do when you encounter a stranded sea snake. There are also a couple of pages of what to do if you encounter a snake in your house or garden. (For the non-herpers that end up with this book!)
The Naturalist’s Guide was no 1 on Amazon in the category Reptile and Amphibian Biology. Before even being published, Princeton University Press picked up the Field Guide, making it the second Australian reptile field guide they have ever published. The first/last one was 21 years ago. So the Field Guide is already off to an awesome start!!!
Unfortunately the Princeton University Press publication is only for sale in the States, but that didn't dampen our enthusiasm too much when we discovered they had picked it up!
If you wish to purchase the Field Guide to the Snakes of Australia, here is the link:
Nature 4 You contacts:
Website: www.wildlifedemonstrations.com
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