Birds of Western Australia

Blurb

The Birds of Western Australia is a book first published in 1948 by Patersons Press Ltd in Perth, Western Australia. Its full title originally was A Handbook of the Birds of Western Australia, though with the publication of the 5th edition only the shorter form was used. It was authored by Dominic Serventy and Hubert Whittell. It was issued in octavo format and contains 372 pages bound in blue buckram with a dustjacket illustrated with a painting of Australian pelicans by Harley Webster. It contains a coloured frontispiece of paintings of the heads of Meliphaga honeyeaters, with numerous black-and-white drawings and maps scattered through the text.
The book covered birds recorded within the Australian state of Western Australia except, as the full title of the first edition indicates, the tropical Kimberley region of its north. It was the first Australian regional ornithological handbook. In the Introduction the authors state:
”The need for some such Handbook as this one was impressed on the authors by their own early experiences in Western Australian ornithology.