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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Cantelo" data-source="post: 1393609" data-attributes="member: 2844">It's a completely different book.  'The Shell Guide to the Birds of Britain & Europe' was written by James Ferguson-Lees, the maps complied by J T R Sharrock and the plates painted by Ian Willis; names perhaps not so well known by a younger generation of birders but a very distinguished and expert team.  It was published back in 1983 by Michael Joseph.  It covered 488 species (i.e. every bird then on the British List other than species then not recorded since 1930).  About 260 'core' species were treated in detail in the main section of the book with UK maps, status details, food & breeding biology.  In this section each double page spread covered between 2-3 species (occasionally 4).  The last 80 pages covered all vagrants with each double page covering about 4-5 species (with smaller illustrations and no maps the ID text in this section remained very good).  Personally I've always felt that this seperation of common birds and gross rarities worked very well.    I've always thought that this was the ieal template for a good UK field guide. It was only let down by rather wishy washy reproduction of the plates.  A German edition of this book (Vogel Mitteleuropas), covering 540 species and arranged in conventional taxonomic order, was published in 1987.  I was always somewhat disappointed that this version never appeared in English since it would have been a very useful European field guide - not a Collins guide perhaps, but in many ways superior to what was then available.  As you will appreciate from this (overly) exhaustive response it remains a favourite book!</blockquote>

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