John Cantelo
Well-known member
I pottered into my local Waterstone’s today looking for the new edition of “WWB in Southern Spain” and found no less than two new field guides! The first was the ‘New Holland Bird Guide by Peter Barthel & illustrated by Paschalis Dougalis. Apparently it was published in German in 2006 as “Was fliegt denn da?” (apparently inspired by a book of the same name first published in 1936!). It covers 500 bird species and claims to be the most taxonomically up-to-date book currently available with splits like Caspian Gull, Yelkouan Shearwater, Balearic Warbler, Sykes’s Warbler & Redpolls etc. included. It’s certainly up-to-the-minute, but the claim seems a bit over inflated since the recent Philips guide (a revised version of the old Hamlyn guide) and Peter Hayman’s pocket guide cover most of the splits. (Although I think it’s the first guide to split Iberian Green Woodpecker).
The illustrations are beautifully done – perhaps they don’t have quite the technical virtuosity of the Collins guide, but they’re very, very good. The artist, Paschalis Dougalis, is an interesting character – a Greek theology student turned wildlife artist living in Germany who has a great website/blog … in English! (see - http://dougalis-wildlifeart.blogspot.com ; http://dougalis-art.com/links/ ). It’s a small and portable book, but this smallness is its Achilles heel. With only 70 plates for the claimed 1,700 bird images and the text squeezed onto the opposite page the illustrations are tiny, the ID notes brief in the extreme and the maps really tiny. A pity as a larger book with illustrations shown at a size to do them justice and more text it might have been very useful. As it is, really tricky species simply don’t get the space they need. Good idea, it fails only because it’s over ambitious trying as it does to get a quart into a pint pot.
Another new field guide just out is ‘A Field Guide to the Bird Songs and Calls of Britain and Northern Europe’ by Dave Farrow - I didn’t much like the illustrations but I’m sure the two CDs will be useful.
Still, if neither of these books please then perhaps “Identifying Birds by Colour” (256pp) by Norman Arlott (due this April) and covering a more modest 300 species will do the trick. And if not, then maybe ‘Birds of Britain and Europe’ (256pp) by Volker Dierschke (A & C Black) which is due in June covers 440 species and may please!
The illustrations are beautifully done – perhaps they don’t have quite the technical virtuosity of the Collins guide, but they’re very, very good. The artist, Paschalis Dougalis, is an interesting character – a Greek theology student turned wildlife artist living in Germany who has a great website/blog … in English! (see - http://dougalis-wildlifeart.blogspot.com ; http://dougalis-art.com/links/ ). It’s a small and portable book, but this smallness is its Achilles heel. With only 70 plates for the claimed 1,700 bird images and the text squeezed onto the opposite page the illustrations are tiny, the ID notes brief in the extreme and the maps really tiny. A pity as a larger book with illustrations shown at a size to do them justice and more text it might have been very useful. As it is, really tricky species simply don’t get the space they need. Good idea, it fails only because it’s over ambitious trying as it does to get a quart into a pint pot.
Another new field guide just out is ‘A Field Guide to the Bird Songs and Calls of Britain and Northern Europe’ by Dave Farrow - I didn’t much like the illustrations but I’m sure the two CDs will be useful.
Still, if neither of these books please then perhaps “Identifying Birds by Colour” (256pp) by Norman Arlott (due this April) and covering a more modest 300 species will do the trick. And if not, then maybe ‘Birds of Britain and Europe’ (256pp) by Volker Dierschke (A & C Black) which is due in June covers 440 species and may please!