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

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The Collins Bird Guide app is destined to become a real triumph, the ultimate in field guide apps — and deservedly so.’ With its greater pagination and added illustrations, the new version is bigger and better than ever. But what exactly has changed, and has it made sufficient strides during the 12-year wait for an update to be published? 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!

In addition to these subtle changes, there are some more prominent amendments: the harriers, for example, are substantially revised and now shown in a total of 61 (mostly new) images, compared to the 48 in the 2nd edition. Other groups receiving major overhauls include divers, owls, swifts and tits. New vignettes showing typical habitat or field impressions and thumbnail illustrations are added for many species. Finally, the maps have been updated based on any newly published atlases. It is hard to think of many examples where genuinely distinctive regional forms of any of the species covered are not now depicted. One that springs to mind is the Gran Canaria Blue Chaffinch Fringilla polatzekibut that, including its distinctive voice, is at least now described in the text (with Gran Canaria and Tenerife Blue Chaffinch Fringilla teydea treated as a single species).With expanded text and additional colour illustrations, the second edition of the hugely successful Collins Bird Guide is a must for every birdwatcher. 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. The Collins Bird Guide App combines world-class illustrations and comprehensive information with intuitive design to create the ultimate field guide to the birds of Britain and Europe. For passionate birders and casual birdwatchers alike. 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.

With expanded text and additional colour illustrations, the third edition of the hugely successful Collins Bird Guide is a must for every birdwatcher. Browse through the beautiful illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström, and read the detailed text by Lars Svensson. 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 app has been designed to give intuitive navigation on Android, and contains the same great features as the iOS app including search, filter, and compare. 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.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.

Collins Bird Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe". www.nhbs.com . Retrieved 18 December 2022. 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. 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. 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.Mullarney, Killian; Svensson, Lars; Zetterstrom, Dan; Grant, Peter (1999). Collins Bird Guide. Collins. ISBN 0-00-219728-6. 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. Collins Bird Guide, second edition". HarperCollins. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011 . Retrieved 23 November 2009. Svensson, Lars; Grant, Peter; Mullarney, Killian; Zetterstrom, Dan (1999). Fågelguiden: Europas och Medelhavsområdets Fåglar i Fält. Bonnier. ISBN 978-91-34-51038-8.