The Birds of Ireland: a Field Guide

Field guides should ideally fit into an anorak pocket; few field guides achieve this – but this one does. So well done Collins Press in producing this style of field guide! The first 10% of the book is an introduction to the art of birdwatching (the authors choosing not to use the terms birding and birders – nostalgically refreshing!). The other 90% of the book is divided into sections concerning major groups of species – so for instance there’s a section on waders, another on thrushes and so on – the book structured to pull the reader into the appropriate pages to identify individual species. Each section contains Irish species only: firstly the commoner species that birdwatchers are likely to encounter and secondly a few pages on the scarcer species. And to reduce confusion still further, the authors adopted everyday names for birds – so Fulmar rather than Northern Fulmar for instance. For each of the individual common species, the book dedicates just one page. The majority of each page contains a carefully selected medley of photographs to suitably aid identification, with just a small amount of text to further explain key identification features as well as seasonal distribution and habitats, therefore doing away with distribution maps that would have enlarged the book unnecessarily. Clearly this book is targeted at the beginner birdwatcher.

Book reviewed by Julian Greenwood