Isabel Castro; Antonia Phillips: A Guide to the Birds of the Galápagos Islands. Princeton University Press 1996  

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Well, this is a quite old or even obsolete book, and unfortunately, I cannot recommend it at all.  

The birds of the Galápagos Islands have not deserved such a disappointing and ugly concoction, well, actually no creature has!  

The illustrations are at the best „not so good“ (don’t let yourself be fooled by the cover picture), the descriptions are beyond good and evil, the sizes of the Darwin Finches are given in grams!!! In grams, that means the weight! What the heck … how is this supposed to be of any help in identifying birds in the wild, especially such small and consimilar birds like especially the Darwin Finches are?  

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I personally think especially a book about the birds oft the Galápagos Islands should not just only mention the existence of subspecies (the book does in some cases, but not always), it should name them and show them with depictions, just to display the evolutionary processes that are going on, because:  

(Galápagos Islands = Evolutionary Laboratory … ever heard of that before?).  

Sorry, a given chance wasted!  

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However, maybe someone else is willing to go to the trouble of doing a suitable book about this topic. The birds of the Galápagos Islands deserve it, and they are not so many, so it should be possible!   

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edited: 13.11.2017