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A good bird I.D. book


billytheghillie
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The Collins Bird Guide is just about the best in the business.

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I have a shed load of ID guides lying around, but the most battered, thumbed, rain-soaked and all round mistreated one is the Collins. The drawings are first rate and show multiple morphs and phases to help and where there are potential confusion species, they put in diagrams to aid splitting (in the boxes on the second pic). Great maps and descriptions.

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The debate over photographs vs pictures will rumble on, but I prefer drawings because they take out any issues with variations in light making birds' colour look different. Also you get a consensus bird to work from; if a photographed bird has a slight colour aberration, then it's not necessarily immediately clear that that's what it is, rather than standard plumage. And when it comes to birds like buzzards, morphology is so diverse you couldn't necessarily hope to photograph them all well, so drawings take care of that too. 

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9 hours ago, chrisjpainter said:

The Collins Bird Guide is just about the best in the business.

Another vote for the Collins, but the reservation is that it is VERY comprehensive which makes it larger and harder to carry about/navigate - and there is a lot of content you are very very unlikely to ever need in the UK.  On the plus side it is both very comprehensive and well printed/bound etc. (mine is an earlier edition of the same book I think).

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22 minutes ago, JohnfromUK said:

Another vote for the Collins, but the reservation is that it is VERY comprehensive which makes it larger and harder to carry about/navigate - and there is a lot of content you are very very unlikely to ever need in the UK.  On the plus side it is both very comprehensive and well printed/bound etc. (mine is an earlier edition of the same book I think).

I agree, although it's nice to have all of Europe. It is certainly not a concise book, but if you're going for a bird watching day, then I reckon it's worth having a decent book with you. and if it's to live in the car or on a shelf it doesn't matter if it's not the lightest. It's surprising how quickly a pocket guide can run out of species. All it takes is for something like a glossy ibis to show up - rare, but not THAT rare here in the south - and the RSPB guide draws a blank. 

 

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1 hour ago, London Best said:

Whatever happened to ‘The Observer’s Book of Birds’ that we all used to have?

Ditto the bird’s eggs version? Not seen one of those for....?

Two things. One, they're out of date. Species have changed and split, species for the UK are different now and population maps are very different.

Secondly on the eggs front. As egg collecting is now illegal and was such a huge problem, particularly for rare birds of prey, such guides aren't easy to get hold of for the mass market these days. They're still available for the scientific market, but the days of the general public disturbing nests to get a look at eggs are gone. 

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The worst thing about the Observer's Book was that less than half the illustrations were in colour and the latter were not too good.  But it was still great when you were about 10. Just a few years after it came (from Collins) the "Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, which was a revelation.

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2 hours ago, London Best said:

Whatever happened to ‘The Observer’s Book of Birds’ that we all used to have?

Ditto the bird’s eggs version? Not seen one of those for....?

Still have both.

35 minutes ago, chrisjpainter said:

Two things. One, they're out of date. Species have changed and split, species for the UK are different now and population maps are very different.

Secondly on the eggs front. As egg collecting is now illegal and was such a huge problem, particularly for rare birds of prey, such guides aren't easy to get hold of for the mass market these days. They're still available for the scientific market, but the days of the general public disturbing nests to get a look at eggs are gone. 

I'm sorry to be an old f but the blackbird which just flew past my window hasn't changed, the wren who visits me in my hide hasn't changed, the greenfinch, the goldfince etc etc have not changed....explain.

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58 minutes ago, chrisjpainter said:

Two things. One, they're out of date. Species have changed and split, species for the UK are different now and population maps are very different.

Secondly on the eggs front. As egg collecting is now illegal and was such a huge problem, particularly for rare birds of prey, such guides aren't easy to get hold of for the mass market these days. They're still available for the scientific market, but the days of the general public disturbing nests to get a look at eggs are gone. 

 

25 minutes ago, Pushandpull said:

The worst thing about the Observer's Book was that less than half the illustrations were in colour and the latter were not too good.  But it was still great when you were about 10. Just a few years after it came (from Collins) the "Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, which was a revelation.

I was joking!

The ‘Observer’s’ series were kid’s books, which we all had when we were about 10.

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22 minutes ago, Walker570 said:

Still have both.

I'm sorry to be an old f but the blackbird which just flew past my window hasn't changed, the wren who visits me in my hide hasn't changed, the greenfinch, the goldfince etc etc have not changed....explain.

The chiffchaff was once just a chiffchaff. Now it's been split into a common chiffchaff, an Iberian chiffchaff, a Siberian chiffchaff, a Canary Islands chiffchaff etc. Same with the Caspian gull and the Yellow-Legged Gull. Old guides won't have any of the three commonly seen egrets in this country as a UK bird, nor rarities like the glossy Ibis, and I wonder what the distribution information would say about the red kite's population in England?

Things have moved on. 

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3 hours ago, London Best said:

Whatever happened to ‘The Observer’s Book of Birds’ that we all used to have?

Ditto the bird’s eggs version? Not seen one of those for....?

I bought one on eBay last year at a very reasonable price for our younger granddaughters. 

It seems to have covered all the bases for them, but doesn't include the damned green ring-neck parakeet (nor indeed the ibis).

 

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9 hours ago, chrisjpainter said:

I agree, although it's nice to have all of Europe. It is certainly not a concise book, but if you're going for a bird watching day, then I reckon it's worth having a decent book with you. and if it's to live in the car or on a shelf it doesn't matter if it's not the lightest. It's surprising how quickly a pocket guide can run out of species. All it takes is for something like a glossy ibis to show up - rare, but not THAT rare here in the south - and the RSPB guide draws a blank. 

 

As above. I also have the Collins App on my phone. You also videos and bird calls too 

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On 24/04/2022 at 20:37, billytheghillie said:

Thanks for all the replys.

One thing to watch out for! The Collins guide above is significantly different to the BTO Collins guide! I have both and find the latter onerously complicated at times. Take wheel of expectation for example:

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It represents the likelihood of seeing a particular bird throughout the calendar. More red = more likely. But then the number in the middle is the percentage of times the bird is likely to be seen on a birding trip to go and watch the bird. Then the maps aren't just done by colours for all year, summer winter and passage. They're done with a complex sliding scale of colours and is not the clearest, although it is taken directly from scientific data of records, so it's accurate if not overly helpful! It's more aimed at the slightly geeky birder/ornithologist, but I'd say I am one of those and I really don't like it!

That said, it's not bad - for a photo ID guide ;)


 

Edited by chrisjpainter
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On 23/04/2022 at 23:04, chrisjpainter said:

Oh...just don't get the RSPB ones with drawings. The colours are pretty useless in a fair few of them!

I completely agree - I have never owned a copy until three days ago when Amazon somehow sent me a copy instead of the wind vane I had actually ordered! I had a quick look through (to bake sure it definitely wasn't a wind vane) and was surprised that in this day and age, the bird images were drawings rather than photos of actual birds.

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