Collins Bird Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe

Product Information

British Trust for Ornithology, BTO, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk IP24 2PU, Tel: +44 (0)1842 750050 Fax: +44 (0)1842 750030 Mullarney, Killian; Svensson, Lars; Zetterstrom, Dan; Grant, Peter (1999). Collins Bird Guide. Collins. ISBN 0-00-219728-6.

often called ‘small thrushes’), tits and a few finches and buntings are some of these. More than 50 plates are either new or have been repainted, completely or partly. Apart from this, a few new vignettes have been added. The section with vagrants has been expanded to accommodate more images and longer texts for several species. The entire text and all maps have of course also been revised. The Collins Bird Guide App combines world-class illustrations and comprehensive information with intuitive design to create the ultimate field guide to the birds of Britain and Europe. For passionate birders and casual birdwatchers alike. Most readers probably already own a copy of the best-selling Collins Bird Guide, widely regarded as the finest regional identification guide ever created. Indeed, the vast majority of Western Palearctic birdwatchers under the age of 30 will never have known anything else as their baseline reference and it is the go-to identification guide for virtually everyone else too. For this reason, the arrival of the 3rd edition is something of an event.

But the advantages of apps go well beyond savings on weight. In fact, the benefits of apps and eBooks are so strong that I'm now reluctant to buy books unless they are available in digital format. Apps can be searched for particular species or search terms and song/calls can be played – both of which are impossible in physical books. The Collins Bird Guide app offers a 'search by attributes' feature that allows searching for birds, using for example colouration or size, and should appeal to less experienced birders. Furthermore, it has a comparison feature, which allows similar species from various parts of the book to be compared side by side, which is very useful and again impossible in the physical version of the book.

More than 1,200 photographs are featured and many are seen here for the first time. They have been chosen carefully to show not only important identification features but also to give clues to the usual habitat favoured by the bird, and its typical posture. Many of the changes in this new edition amount to fine-tunings, and playing spot-the-difference with the 2nd edition is an education in itself. The best field guide anywhere just got even better, being thoroughly revised, updated and substantially more comprehensive than before. It comes highly recommended, even to owners of the 2nd edition, especially given its extremely reasonable price. Its authors are Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney, Dan Zetterström and Peter J. Grant, and it is illustrated by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström (with two plates of North American passerines contributed by Larry McQueen in the first edition). [1] It has been described as "undoubtedly the finest field guide that has ever been produced", and "the last great bird book of the 20th century". [2]Most of the species covered in the main part of the guide are regular breeding, wintering or migrant species in its area of coverage, although some vagrants are also included. There are additional sections giving brief accounts of (a) vagrants and (b) introduced breeding species and species recorded only as escapes. I could find next to nothing that I didn’t like about the app; the main issue I discovered was that the species comparisons are evidently optimised for viewing on the larger screen of an iPad. On my iPhone 5s, the presented information appears very small for some species comparisons (Arctic, Common and Whiskered Terns for example), with the text unreadable when they are presented directly together in this way – something that would be curable with the introduction of pinching in a future version. Another minor (and slightly pedantic) point is that there are the odd snippets of out-of-date information in the text, and some of the British status codes are a little wayward – though these are problems stemming from the original text, rather than a fault of the app itself. The book provides all the information needed to identify any species at any time of the year, covering size, habitat, range, identification and voice. Accompanying every species entry is a distribution map and illustrations showing the species in all the major plumages (male, female, immature, in flight, at rest, feeding: whatever is important).

Browse through the beautiful illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström, and read the detailed text by Lars Svensson. The Collins Bird Guide needs little introduction. With more than 1 million copies sold and the book translated into 23 languages, its success as a field guide to the birds of Europe is in no doubt. Quite simply, there is no better guide for identifying birds in the region. But not only is it available as a book, it has also been made into an app by developers at NatureGuides. I barely have any niggles with the app, but one is that the 'search by attributes' bar in the top right of the screen is occasionally unresponsive for me. The positioning of the text in the comparison views can occasionally be too far from or too close to the plates. However, the beauty of apps is that they can be continuously updated, meaning any niggles are often ironed out in future updates. Co-authored by our own BTO staff member Paul Stancliffe, this unique identification guide features all the common birds of Britain and Ireland, including all species that breed regularly in the region, plus those that winter here, or occur as common passage migrants.Alternatively, at the home screen, this feature sits as its own function where the user is able compare any species via up to six criteria including range, season and habitat, as well as phenotypical attributes such as plumage, size, shape and so on. Cleverly, the app uses GPS to determine your position and therefore the relevant region. This will no doubt be an extremely useful feature for birders holidaying in locations where they may not necessarily be familiar with identification possibilities. Relative abundance maps are shown for every species. The darker shading shows where a species is most abundant and the lighter shades where it is less so, for both winter and summer. These are based on the very latest information contained within the BTO’s Bird Atlas 2007–11. In addition, a calendar wheel shows the months when species are most frequently seen. Such attention to detail extends beyond the remote and exotic to include previously neglected plumages or aspects of several more widespread and familiar species too. Juvenile plumages of many passerines are now shown, additional plumages are included for the likes of Greater Flamingo Phoenicopterus roseus, Snowy Owl Bubo scandiacus, Osprey Pandion haliaetusand others, while several finches are depicted in flight for the first time. Many of these changes might initially escape notice, even to those intimately familiar with their 2nd edition. This is even more true of many textual changes, which are often subtle and include, for instance, the addition (orremoval) of analogies here and there or small adjustments to modifiers. These are sometimes granular changes, but all contribute to the wider purpose of making the Collins Bird Guidemore precise, more complete and, ultimately, more useful. With expanded text and additional colour illustrations, the second edition of the hugely successful Collins Bird Guide is a must for every birdwatcher. Collins Bird Guide updated, but did anyone know?". www.rarebirdalert.co.uk . Retrieved 2 February 2018.

It is hard to think of many examples where genuinely distinctive regional forms of any of the species covered are not now depicted. One that springs to mind is the Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch Fringilla polatzekibut that, including its distinctive voice, is at least now described in the text (with Gran Canaria and Tenerife Blue Chaffinch Fringilla teydea treated as a single species).Collins Bird Guide, second edition". HarperCollins. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011 . Retrieved 23 November 2009. Collins Bird Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe". www.nhbs.com . Retrieved 18 December 2022.