Advanced Bird ID Handbook by Nils van Duivendijk

It's no secret that I am a fan of Nils van Duivendijk's Advanced Bird ID Guide; to most intents and purposes the Advanced Bird ID Handbook is a very similar beast. It has the same bullet-pointed layout and, beyond the topography charts on the inside cover, sticks with the illustration-free approach. Rather than repeat its virtues again here, I suggest reading my review of the ID Guide. However, there are additions in the ID Handbook that supplement the ID Guide. According to the cover text, there are "significant updates and additions to 570 species accounts", while the 1,350 species and subspecies listed between the covers adds 50 to the ID Guide. Some additions represent species recently recorded in the Western Palearctic (e.g. Yellow-crowned Night Heron) while others reflect the adoption of a split (e.g. Penduline Tit into Eurasian, Black-headed and White-headed). In the case of the latter example, the non-Eurasian taxa were already covered in the ID Guide but warranted nothing more than a brief line or two; in the ID Handbook the accounts for both (and for caspius Eurasian Penduline Tit) have been beefed up somewhat with new information.

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!