Look! It's a bird! It's a white-cheeked bulbul!

It may never be a best-seller, but A Field Guide to the Birds of Iraq is certainly a milestone. This is the first Arabic-language book devoted to the 387 species of birds found in Iraq. It's the result of a remarkable project by the Ornithological Society of the Middle East, Nature Iraq and Birdlife International.

The publishers of the field guide to Iraq's birds will be hoping to match the success of Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq, written by Jonathan Trouern-Trend.

A sergeant with the Connecticut National Guard, Trouern-Trend was sent to Iraq in February 2003. He had been a birdwatcher from the age of 12, so he looked out for birds when on patrol and during his free time around Baghdad. He then wrote about his sightings in a blog that attracted thousands of readers. The best posts were collected in Birding Babylon and published by the Sierra Club and the University of California Press.

Trouern-Trend said his favourite Iraqi bird was the white-cheeked bulbul. "We'd be wilting in the heat, and these little birds were flitting around like it was nothing," he told Tom Valtin of the Sierra Club. "And there were birds I saw all the time on the base that I'll always associate with my time there. We had barn owls nesting in our bunker."