Advanced Bird ID Handbook by Nils van Duivendijk
What really separates the ID Handbook from the ID Guide is its size — if the ID Guide is a pocket book, the ID Handbook is definitely a stay-at-home book. But the extra size has many advantages; whilst I never felt the ID Guide was cramped, it was certainly compact. Here, the text is larger and spaced out across bordering-on-A4-sized pages. It makes the whole reading experience a lot more pleasurable. And the extra space lends itself to one more new feature, too: comparison tables. There are 23 in total and they cover obvious 'species pairs' such as Marsh and Willow Tit, Sykes's and Booted Warbler, and Manx and Yelkouan Shearwater. Within these tables, differences between the two species can be directly compared side by side:
Hume's Leaf Warbler and Yellow-browed Warbler — key features compared (from Advanced Bird ID Handbook)
The book concludes with a checklist of Western Paleartic species following the taxonomy used in the book but excluding species recorded solely in Catagory C. As with the ID Guide, this book delivers a wealth of knowledge that you wouldn't find in a single place elsewhere. Available at £23.50 on the BirdGuides estore, it also feels like great value for money. It does, though, render the conclusion of my previous review somewhat useless; in actual fact, this is the book you want for your shelf. I guess the second copy of the ID Guide will have to live in the glovebox as a spare!
Advanced Bird ID Handbook: the Western Palearctic by Nils van Duivendijk, published 2011 by New Holland
Softcover. 416 pages, 10 line drawing of topography, 1 map, 23 tables.
RRP £24.99. ISBN: 9781780090221