Ber van Perlo

Ber van Perlo (born June 22, 1936 in Nijmegen , Netherlands ) is a Dutch bird illustrator and author.

Life

After studying landscape architecture at Wageningen University , van Perlo worked from 1964 to 1991 as a landscape architect and spatial planner for the Staatsbosbeheer (Dutch state forest administration). After visiting Kenya , he began working as a professional bird illustrator in 1982. At that time there was no printed bird guide in which all bird species of East Africa were illustrated and in particular the migratory birds from Europe and Asia were listed. For this reason, van Perlo went on his second bird exploration tour through Kenya in 1984 , where he made bird sketches and distribution maps for a planned field guide. Van Perlo used colored pencils for the first version of the color charts. When he received an assurance from the publisher HarperCollins in 1987 that his field guide would be printed, he drew the color plates again in gouache . In 1991 van Perlo retired from civil service and moved to Kenya, where he studied and sketched bird hides in the Nairobi National Museum . In 1995 van Perlo's first book Field Guide Birds of Eastern Africa was published , in which 450 species are illustrated. Birds of Southern Africa followed in 1999 , in which 1250 African bird species are illustrated and described. In total, van Perlo drew over 7,000 species of birds from Africa, Asia, Mexico, Central America, South America, New Zealand, Hawaii as well as from the Central and Western Pacific. In addition to his own field guides, van Perlo also illustrated works by other authors, including Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by Krys Kazmierczak, Rails - A Guide to Rails, Crakes, Gallinules and Coots of the World by Barry Taylor and The Megapodes by Darryl N. Jones, René WRJ Dekker and Cees S. Roselaar .

Works (selection)

• Collins Field Guide - Birds of Eastern Africa, 1995
• Bird Families of the World: The Megapodes, 1995 (Illustrator only)
• Rails - A Guide to Rails, Crakes, Gallinules, and Coots of the World, 1998 (Illustrator only)
• Collins Field Guide - Birds of Southern Africa, 1999 (reprinted in 2009)
• Swifts: A Guide to the Swifts and Treeswifts of the World, 2000 (Illustrator only)
• Birds of the Indian Subcontinent - A field guide to the birds of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and the Maldives (Illustrator only)
• Birds of Western and Central Africa, 2002
• A Field Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Central America, 2006
• Birds of Serra dos Tucanos, 2008
• A Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil, 2009
• Birds of New Zealand, Hawaii, Central and West Pacific, 2011
• Birds of South America: Passerines (Collins Field Guide), 2015

Web links

• Official website of Ber van Perlo with biography and catalog raisonné