From August 2024 it is available in Kindle Amazon
Birding Albania has published an essential guide for watching birds in Albania — designed to help birdwatchers, nature enthusiasts, and eco-travelers discover birds of Albania.
The idea to publish this book took root nearly a decade ago. This has been a project close to my heart, one that I have anticipated eagerly, waiting until I felt equipped with sufficient knowledge and data to create a book that would truly benefit birdwatchers visiting Albania. After co-authoring the first complete field guide to the birds of Albania in 2016 with my colleague and friend Stoyan C. Nikolov, my thoughts naturally turned to making this book the next one.
Albania may be a small country, but it is a true gem in terms of biodiversity. Within its 28,748 square kilometers, where Albania’s terrestrial borders lie, the country encompasses four biogeographical regions, hosting a rich variety of ecosystems and habitats. This remarkable biodiversity makes Albania the most biologically diverse country in the Balkans, and likely one of the richest in Europe, when measured by biodiversity per unit of surface area.
I firmly believe that this natural wealth is Albania’s most valuable inheritance, one that could serve as the foundation for the country’s economic and social development through a sustainable model based on nature tourism. This represents one of the greatest opportunities Albania has ever had to achieve growth and prosperity.
This first edition of this book contains only text and no visual materials of sites or birds of Albania. I understand that a book with photos would be more visually appealing, and I have thousands of photographs in my archives. I might do this in a 2nd edition of this book. Nevertheless, what I believe is most valuable for birdwatchers in this book is the detailed information I provide about which birds can be seen, and when and where they can be found in Albania.
To write this book, I drew upon my extensive knowledge and personal database, which includes over 30,000 bird records gathered during 12 years of fieldwork and 8 years of guiding birders in Albania. I have had the privilege of working as a bird guide for some of the world’s largest and most prestigious nature tourism companies, spending long periods in the field throughout the country. While I don’t claim that this book offers a complete picture for every species, I am confident that it provides a clear and accurate representation for most of the species described here.
Here, I describe 355 bird species and provide information if they are common or not in Albania, where they can be seen, when they can be seen, and how they can be seen. In addition to the scientific name, I provide the vernacular names in English, French, German, and Spanish for each species to make the book user-friendly for many bird watchers from different countries.
In addition, this book includes a general chapter in which I briefly describe Albania’s natural heritage and some of the most distinguishing sites. For each site in this chapter, I don’t particularly focus on the description of birds, as this is given in the main content of the book, but I also mention key other wildlife species so that the reader can grasp an idea of what the site is about.
I have not included itineraries or maps for particular birding tours here as that would take many pages of this book, and a certain amount of this kind of information might be accessed online by everyone on this website. I hope this book will encourage birdwatchers to visit Albania and serve them to a good extent.
