If any place needed a field guide, it was Peru, second only to Colombia as the most bird-rich country in the world. (In fact, Peru's roughly 1,800 species account for nearly 20 percent of the planet's avifauna, yet even today much of the country remains unexplored.)

O'Neill began thinking about a field guide for the birds of Peru not long after he first set foot in the country, in 1961.

Now, 40 years after he first envisioned a field guide, O'Neill and his principal co-authors, Tom Schulenberg and Doug Stotz, have finally completed the guide against which all others for the New World tropics will be judged. Available now from Princeton University Press, The Birds of Peru's ($49.50) nearly 4,000 color illustrations alone—more than double that of any other single-country neotropics guide—set it apart.

Many of the sightings on which the range maps are based were made by the late Ted Parker, arguably the ultimate authority on the birds of Peru before his untimely death in a plane crash in Ecuador in 1993.

It was Parker who joined forces with O'Neill in the early years to get the book started. And Schulenberg and Stotz have relied greatly on the volumes of notes Parker left behind.

The Birds of Peru is the culmination of an incredible amount of fieldwork, but that doesn't mean the exploration is finished.

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