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

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Browse through the beautiful illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström, and read the detailed text by Lars Svensson. With expanded text and additional colour illustrations, the second edition of the hugely successful Collins Bird Guide is a must for every birdwatcher. 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. 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. 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.

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. calendar wheel shows when species are most likely to be seen. Invaluable images and insightful new maps The combination of definitive text, up-to-date distribution maps and superb illustrations, all in a single volume, makes this book the ultimate field guide, essential on every bookshelf and birdwatching trip. 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. 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.Among the nifty functions shared with the Apple version include the ability to create multiple lists, potentially a way to keep daily birding records or create a British or Western Palearctic list. Additions can easily be made while viewing a species profile or editing a list, enabling date, time, location and further notes to be added to each record. However, some may find off-putting the inability to add any of the unillustrated species dumped in the 'vagrants, accidentals and introduced' category. The first of these points is also a niggle with the Apple version, on which you can, however, list species without extra details being forced. It's also a shame that the map used for fixing a location cannot be switched to satellite view.

British Trust for Ornithology, BTO, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk IP24 2PU, Tel: +44 (0)1842 750050 Fax: +44 (0)1842 750030 ANWB Vogelgids van Europa, second edition. ANWB. 2010. p.448. ISBN 9789018030803. Archived from the original on 24 October 2012 . Retrieved 7 June 2013. The new illustrations are, as you'd expect given the calibre of the authors, superb. From the perspective of the British birder, updates to some of the terns, swifts, Old World flycatchers and finches are among the most relevant. Among my favourites were the updated harriers and redstarts, while the distinguishing of Hornemann's Arctic Redpoll is also welcome. Svensson, Lars; Grant, Peter; Mullarney, Killian; Zetterstrom, Dan (1999). Fågelguiden: Europas och Medelhavsområdets Fåglar i Fält. Bonnier. ISBN 978-91-34-51038-8. 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.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). 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. 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. Mullarney, Killian; Svensson, Lars; Zetterstrom, Dan; Grant, Peter (1999). Collins Bird Guide. Collins. ISBN 0-00-219728-6.

The cover of the first edition, in all formats, depicts a barn owl. On the second edition, this was replaced by an Arctic tern. Original Swedish version of the third edition features a bluethroat, while the English version shows a barn swallow. Given the resounding success of the Collins Bird Guide over the past 15 years and its undisputed position as the region's top field guide, the potential for a quality app version was always great. However, putting theory into practice is no mean feat and the Touch Press team is to be applauded for forging an avant-garde production that is crisply designed and extremely well presented, and also boasts a number of thoughtful, innovative and above all instructive features that the book version could never offer. And, to boot, it weighs nothing – a sure-fire bonus when out on an exhausting day in the field!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. Svensson, Lars; Grant, Peter; Mullarney, Killian; Zetterstrom, Dan (1999). Fugle i felten: Feltbestemmelse af fugle i Europa og Middelhavsområdet. L&R Fakta. ISBN 87-614-0107-2. Author(s): Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney, Dan Zetterström Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Edition:

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