Europe’s Birds: An Identification Guide

There is a brand new guide to European Birds due to cause a stir among birders ever eager to have the most up to date in field guides. Rob Hume, Robert Still, Andy Swash, and Hugh Harrop – the four co-authors of the bestselling Britain’s Birds: An Identification Guide and British Birds: A Pocket Guide – have followed up with Europe’s Birds: An Identification Guide – “the most comprehensive single-volume photographic guide to Europe’s birds ever produced”.

Covering 900 species in 640 pages, 4,700 colour photos, and 540 maps – at a very reasonable price – it’s impossible to see how this latest WILDGuide can be anything but another winning-formula best seller.

Before discussing the book and contents a word of caution is warranted, though probably unnecessary for most birders – buying bird ID books can be like buying the latest technology. Just as we think we have the latest and best camera, binoculars, or telescope, a newer model appears that promises to surpass everything that went before. Just as optics change, usually without warning, so does taxonomy, the science that deals with the description, identification, naming, and classification of bird species or families. Taxonomy is ever in flux, and what you thought was “settled” quickly becomes outdated and/or obsolete, just like that pair of Zeiss bins, the bees-knees of 2019.

Now more than ever a buyer must accept that a date line is inevitably drawn with printed field guides and that keeping tabs on a species in the ever-evolving field of science isn’t feasible through printed books alone. To this end, users should note that Europe’s Birds follows the scientific classification of BirdLife International rather than The International Ornithologists’ Union or other bodies. Confusions and disagreements over the treatment of species and subspecies do and will arise, especially when discussions around a single, global bird taxonomy system are still ongoing between ornithological institutions.

All that to say you cannot rely upon books alone to keep abreast of taxonomy. A birder must use other methods, such as the Internet and regular publications, in deciding when to lose a tick or claim a new one.

Now, back to Europe’s Birds. This latest volume shows again how recent advances in camera optics and a photographer’s ability to fully exploit this progress have led to the demise of line-drawn and painted guides – books that, while not obsolete, are now used by fewer birders.

The quality of the photographs displayed in this field guide – the work of 350 worldwide photographers – is stunning and exceptional. Overall, they are simply the best on offer, so much so that I struggled to find one that didn’t meet the high bar set by this latest example of photographic art. I daresay that by 2021 the majority of birders have been won over by photographic field guides, as exemplified by the WILDGuides series. These are books that provide precise, enjoyable, and reliable identification that simply wasn’t available, much less guaranteed, through even the very best line-drawn books of yesteryear.

The style, format, and layout of Europe’s Birds follow the winning ways of the many WILDGuides that have come before, so to most people reading this review an explanation of how and why this works so well is superfluous. But for those unfamiliar with the splendid WILDGuides presentations, the pictures below serve to illustrate their user-friendly layouts and information delivery. It may be unfair to single out specific pages, but I was particularly excited by a few of my own favourites as well as some that well-exemplify the authors’ care in choosing the most natural and informative images.

With 640 pages, this book is a weighty tome and not very portable; I note that the sub-title is “An identification guide” rather than a “field guide”. However, it’s hard to see how so much information could be compressed into something that would travel more easily, unless you buy the Kindle version.

Europe’s Birds is accessible to birdwatchers of all abilities and experience with many, many pages to simply enjoy or from which to learn or verify an ID – there is something for everyone. And at just £20 or less, the book will be bought by a huge numbers of birders.

Following the Covid pandemic there is huge pent-up demand to restart travel, not least for locked-down birders who long to return to the birding hot spots of Europe, armed with the best available field guide for their journey. That would be Europe’s Birds: An Identification Guide. I only hope that Princeton printed enough copies of it to satisfy the demand of the coming weeks and months. But I confidently predict a sell out, so get your order in quick.

– Reviewed by Frank Lambert