A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe

View other editions of A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe.
View books by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, P. A. D. Hollum.

No longer a top field guide. - Rated
This book was originally published in 1954, and although it has been revised several times since then, in my opinion it is now time move on.
For a long time this was probably the best field guide on the market (if this was not true I might have only given it 2 stars), now other field guides have surpassed it. This guide will enable you to identify most bird that you might see in Europe, but it is certainly not the best available - more recent guides have taken on board the best features and improved the rest. It is time that collins let this one go.

Peterson a classic! - Rated
This was my first birdbook, and I got it almost 35 years ago. " Peterson " as it is called among birdwatches has served me well during scientific fieldwork in Lofoten islands and other locatons in the eighties and I still use it. Why? The illustrations are second to none, it's "simplicity" is clarifying, to much information ( the case in some new books, I find) can sometimes be confusing. A tru classic!, the reason for still being around I belive.
Rustan Andersson

Not-so-bad-as-all-that guide - Rated
I am spurned to rate this book due to the only other review being a bit harsh in my opinion. I have been using this book (from the institute's library where I have been a student placement) for a year and found it good. The lay-out is quite normal for Collins guides, effectively arranging text and images, and maps in this case, into sections for the sake of expediency. Pictures can be browsed, without the distracting text, to find a 'match' in the field (as one does); text can then be referred to as can the maps. It also serves to keep the book to a nearly manageable size - something that I find is a problem with good ornithology field guides.

Very disappointing - Rated
Compared to previous Collins guides this new book is a grave disappointment. In order to identify a bird one has to use colour plates in the centre of the book. Then it is necessary to refer to another page elsewhere for more detail about the bird. Finally one has to go to the back of the book to find maps which show the bird's distribution. If this weren't bad enough the illustrations are quite inferior to what we have come to expect from Collins.

Old-fashioned format, but the best paintings - Rated
I use both this and the newer Collins guide by Lars Svensson, but when I can only take one field guide with me, I take the Peterson. His immensely skillful paintings, which I appreciate more each time I use them, still seem to be the best available at showing the significant differentiating details that actually help me to identify new birds. Peterson also didn't allow his painted birds to strike eccentric poses that can make comparison between species difficult. (The paintings by Killian Mullarney that make up half of the Svensson book give Peterson a run for his money in clarity and beauty, but the other half, by Dan Zetterstrom, do not.)

The textual descriptions in Svensson's book are longer and more helpful on behavior than those in Peterson's, so it's nice to check my observations against Svensson when I get home. But I find the Svensson guide large, heavy, and tiring to carry around compared to the more compact Peterson. Compared to Peterson, Svensson has too few birds illustrated per page (and many of them are from regions of Europe far, far away), so that flipping through the pages to find the bird you've just seen is always faster and less frustrating in Peterson. Strangely, in this regard I suppose the dated format of Peterson's guide--with all the plates bound together on glossy paper at the center of the book--is really an advantage: you can visually home in on the right bird with minimal turning of pages. Perhaps the best of all worlds would be a format more like Peterson's American field guides--which find a happy medium between the closely-packed visual conciseness of this guide and the thick sprawl of Svensson--but in the meantime I much prefer this.

Both books are pan-European in coverage, but Svensson does have some added value for birders in Scandinavia, with more prominent illustrations of the local races of birds that are especially characteristic of this region--just as Peterson has added value for birders in the British Isles, who are likelier to encounter the British races of many species to which Peterson gives pride of place in his plates.

In sum, I would say that you really cannot go wrong with Peterson as your primary or indeed only European bird book--and certainly not if you live in Britain. This guide has won its place in my heart and my field bag.