Birds by Colour & Identifying Birds by Colour

Just like London buses, you wait for ages for a colour-coded bird guide for beginners and two come along at once! These books represent welcome and useful additions to the current list of bird identification guides.

Both have beautiful covers with attractive thumbnail images, preparing the reader for a visual treat, and on flicking through Duquet’s book the reader is immediately struck by the bright, large-scale ‘in your face’ artwork in the identification section, which is followed by a photo and a smaller illustration in the species accounts section. Moss Taylor and Norman Arlott’s Identifying Birds by Colour appears more ‘wordy’ – it has a full description and account next to an image every time a species is illustrated. However, the neat illustrations fit perfectly alongside, giving the book a tidier, more organised feel.

The authors have diverging attitudes to describing parts of a bird. Duquet eschews “complicated plumage nomenclature” in favour of back, wing, cheek and so on, whereas Taylor and Arlott stress the “importance of learning the correct anatomical terms”; for example, tertials, primary coverts, and so on. For a beginner, and especially youngsters, Duquet’s approach is less daunting, but Taylor and Arlott’s better prepares the reader for the more advanced identification guides he or she will no doubt begin using later on.

Duquet’s guide, translated from the French by Tony Williams, is in two distinct parts. The first is identification, where the reader has 10 different shape silhouettes (heron, raptor and so on) for all ‘large birds’, linked to their relevant picture pages; small birds have a two-page ‘refined search’ section (“dull striped and spotted”, “black on cheeks”). The ‘How to use this guide’ pages explain the process in concise terms.

Once into the images in the identification section, there are a couple of sentences alongside each species’ picture, detailing key features, habitat, behaviour and so on. The use of several good-sized illustrations of potentially confusingly similar species on one page is particularly educative. As in Taylor and Arlott’s book, a species with several colours in its plumage appears more than once in different colour-keyed pages.

The second part of Duquet’s work is the species accounts, with a photograph and a smaller version of the painting alongside the text, which has been given a ‘British Isles’ angle. I particularly liked the idea of naming likely areas or even sites where certain species can be found. The book was designed for the western European market so it features several species rarely, if ever, seen in Britain, but this does not disqualify it from recommendation to beginners in my view, especially as low-cost flights make such birds so accessible these days.

Taylor and Arlott is simple to use: you see a colour on part of a bird, turn to the pages for that colour (visible on the external edges, as in Duquet), choose bird type – land bird, for example – and flick through to find it.

If your companion saw a different colour the same applies; thus the multi-coloured Eurasian Wigeon is featured five times. It is more thorough in illustrating females than the Duquet book (which has no female Blackbird, for example). A useful aid comes in the form of symbols showing relative size to selected ‘silhouette’ species (rather than the old-style ‘length’ and ‘weight’ that Duquet uses), seasons and likely habitats. Both guides give scientific names, and Taylor and Arlott deserve credit for describing calls and song, and for the fact-filled Life of Birds introductory pages.

The experienced birdwatcher will naturally ask why certain species have or have not been included, but it is important to bear in mind the target audience of each book. Duquet has 184 of the commoner western European species, so you’ll find Subalpine Warbler but not Dartford, for example, although Corsican Nuthatch seems a somewhat bizarre inclusion. Illustrations and photographs for each species are a good idea, scoring over the Taylor and Arlott book in terms of variety of visual experience, important with young beginners. There are a few errors in Duquet, which can get in the way of the reader identifying what he or she has just seen. Coal Tit in Taylor and Arlott doesn’t show the white nape stripe. Both books, however, passed the ‘Jay test’, when my mother-in-law successfully found the “pinky-brown and black and white” bird we had just seen bathing in a stream.

With 250 species (all British breeders plus common visitors), I would recommend Taylor and Arlott if the reader is going to be solely UK based, but Duquet is a good choice for beginners who expect to visit mainland Europe with their new binoculars.


Tech spec

• Birds by Colour by Marc Duquet, illustrated by Alban Larousse and Francois Desbordes (Christopher Helm, London, 2008).

• 224 pages, colour illustrations throughout.

• ISBN 9780713689945. Pbk, £12.99

Available from Birdwatch bookshop

• Identifying Birds by Colour by Moss Taylor and Norman Arlott (HarperCollins, London, 2008).

• 256 pages, colour illustrations.

• ISBN 9780007206797. Pbk, £12.99

Available from Birdwatch bookshop

First published in Birdwatch 195:55 (September 2008)