Ber van Perlo has written and illustrated numerous books, including the highly successful Birds of Southern Africa. He studied garden and landscape architecture at the Agricultural University of Wageningen in the Netherlands before working as a geographer and physical planner with the National Forestry Service of the Netherlands. During a holiday in Kenya in 1982 he discovered that no field guide existed which depicted all bird species of the area. He began to produce field guides for various regions of Africa, eventually extending to the Indian Subcontinent and Middle and Southern America.