Written by ornithologist James Bond, the book was first published in 1936 by the Academy of Natural Sciences as part of the International Series.
It was reprinted in 1947 by Macmillan as Field Guide of Birds of the West Indies and has been reprinted several times since then, including as one of the Peterson Field Guides series (PFG 18), a September 1, 1999, edition from Houghton Mifflin and a March 4, 2002 edition from Collins.
The book was the only text exclusively devoted to the avifauna of the region for many decades until A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies (ISBN 0-691-08736-9), by Herbert Raffaele et al., was published in 1998.
Fleming once said in a Reader's Digest interview: "I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, and 'James Bond' was much better than something more interesting, like 'Peregrine Carruthers.'
Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure — an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department."