The back cover pretty much says it all – over 270 pages of detailed and original text. Over 200 colour photographs. Over 180 stunning and accurate illustrations. Large format colour range maps based on latest geolocator and observational studies. Two DVDs with over 120 minutes of highly informative footage with narration.What more can you say? All of this is true but when you start to delve into the book it really comes to life. The illustrations are sublime, and there are so many of them, thirteen for Atlantic Fulmar alone, and accompanied by 30 high-quality photographs. The amount of information is incredible, and all presented in an easy to use way.There are 41 pages dedicated to topography and ‘workshops’ on how to begin to identify the eleven species described, six albatrosses, two giant petrels, two fulmars and Cape Petrel, before we even get to the species accounts in which they are all given a thorough grilling. To top this off there is a section after the species accounts that deals with confusion species and the features to concentrate on to sort them out. I love the way the albatrosses are approached in this section: so you’ve seen an albatross. ‘What species is it?’, ‘It’s an immature Black-browed’, ‘Are you sure?’, ‘Well it’s got dark underwings’, ‘So has Grey-headed’, ‘You don’t get Grey-headed in the North Atlantic’, ‘Seems so, but we’ll never know if we don’t check’. This is followed by four pages on how to separate the two should you be lucky enough to be called upon to do so. The book is rounded off with a thirty-eight page ID jogger, which is a great way to test how much attention you were paying whilst reading the various sections of the book.It doesn’t end here. Two DVDs accompany the guide and are in handy cases fixed to the inside front and back covers. Disc 1 covers the species accounts of all of the birds in the book, with videos and narration of the key features needed to tell them apart. This greatly helps to cement what is discussed in the accounts in the book but also gives the opportunity to test id features under ‘field’ conditions, and it works very well indeed. Disc two looks at the families more broadly but also includes an identification quiz, to really make sure you have been taking notice. Altogether a brilliant guide with a great approach to explaining how to make it a little easier to identify what can be very difficult birds indeed. If you are into seabirds you can’t live without this book.Book reviewed by Paul Stancliffe 

I visited Sumatra last year, armed with a fairly dated “A field guide to the birds of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali” by MacKinnon and Phillipps, and although I did get by with this guide, I felt an improvement was urgently needed.I was therefore delighted to see this latest offering, Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago: Greater Sundas and Wallacea which is a landmark modern and easy to use publication, birds of this incredibly species rich region, covering all 1,417 species, including 601 endemics, known to occur across the Indonesian archipelago. This guide covers a region that spans an arc of more than 16,000 islands that stretch almost 5,000 km along the Equator, one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth.This field guide is remarkably compact considering the number of species covered, and whilst it may not easily fit in a pocket, it is certainly not too large or heavy to carry in a rucksack in the field - though I am not sure how water resistant it would be in the event of a downpour. However, the font is rather small which may be a problem for some.Anyone who has ever visited this, or indeed any rainforest region will understand the frustration in trying to identify birds from field guides; the plates full of side-on profiles of birds, whereas for the majority, all you see of them is their belly and undertail as you crane your neck to look up into the canopy, I felt a book just showing this angle would be more useful!  Joking aside, the plates are superb throughout, with a list of 27 esteemed and highly talented artists to thank including such well-known names as Richard Allen, Hilary Burn, Alan Harris and Jan Wilczur to name but a few contributing.  A major plus in this book is the  inclusion of distribution maps which both MacKinnon & Phillipps and Craig Robson’s Birds of Southeast Asia lacked.  Even better, these maps are placed by the species allowing quick reference to confirm their presence or absence when faced with similar-looking species rather than the species plates being separate from the descriptions and having to find the relevant page and read through the distribution range to see if the area you are in was included.Without going into specific detail, the taxonomy of the species may take some getting used to, especially when trying to enter any records against existing taxonomic lists in BirdTrack or Bubo.org with various species’ names or taxonomic groups being different.Overall though, Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago: Greater Sundas and Wallacea is a superb field guide, and will become the region’s standard field guide for many years to come.Book reviewed by Neil Calbrade 

As with the previous title this book would be useful as a guide to learning woodland bird songs and calls, and covers an extensive range of species but, once again, it contains many species never found in Britain and Ireland (and not all of them are identified as such in the book). This could confuse more novice birdwatchers, who could well be attracted to the approach of this book. In that case, with the inclusion of such species as White-backed Woodpecker, Hazel Hen and Rustic Bunting, perhaps this could be a fantastic resource for more experienced woodland birders to brush up on their European bird songs and calls. The fact that certain key European woodland species are missing suggests otherwise, such as Short-toed Treecreeper which is, ironically, most easily separated from the very similar Treecreeper by song! Book reviewed by Carole Showell 

At first glance, an elegant little book to help you get the hang of wetland bird sounds – a small book, with helpful descriptions and an accompanying CD. However, (and I feel this is a big consideration) this book is meant to help people unfamiliar with wetland birds learn the calls – these are likely to be less experienced birders, so why include the extensive range of European species that will be rare, or even absent, in the UK and Ireland? This will prove extremely confusing. Learning the difference between Reed and Sedge Warbler is difficult enough, without muddying the water (excuse the pun!) with species such as Moustached, Savi’s, Marsh and Great Reed Warblers?Book reviewed by Carole Showell 

Simon Aspinall and Richard Porter. Softback £ 240 24.99 2011 Christopher Helm, London ISBN 978-1-4081-5257-7 Carole Showell 

Since the publication of the first edition of this edited volume 10 years ago, we have all grown in our awareness of the twin biodiversity and climate crises that the planet faces. There is building evidence that the climate is changing, and of its impact on biodiversity, of which the literature on birds is a significant component. The authors start their book with an assessment that more than 11,400 papers have been published on the subject of climate change and birds, of which two thirds have been published since 2010. This makes it very difficult for any of us to keep on top of what is a fast moving literature, and so Dunn and Møller have pulled together an impressive list of 35 internationally respected authors to write 19 chapters that provide an accessible way into this vast topic.The chapters are split across four sections. The first introductory section contains a useful summary of climate change that is particularly helpful for anyone struggling with the complexity of the climate system and the breadth of impacts. It concludes with a bullet point summary of major IPCC results that provides a handy reference of the subject. Having this at the start of the book provides a useful platform on which the rest of the volume is built.The second section has a methodological focus and includes five chapters that provide a useful summary of approaches and latest advances in relation to a number of key aspects of the subject. The first of these reviews sources and approaches to analysing long-term climate data. This will be particularly useful for anyone looking to access such data for their own studies, although there is a risk that the websites mentioned where data may be accessed may gradually go out of date. The second chapter nicely complements the first by reviewing different sources of bird data, many of which result from citizen science initiatives. Three more statistical chapters then follow that consider ways to quantify climate sensitivity, ecological niche modelling and the analysis of population dynamics. These excellent summaries should be very helpful for those looking to undertake similar analyses, and particularly describe some of the most recent developments in modelling impacts on populations.Evidence around the impacts of climate change on bird populations forms the subject of the third book section. This contains chapters that review changes in migration, timing of breeding and breeding success, physiological responses, evolutionary responses, population responses and changes in distribution in response to climate change. The first four of these chapters nicely document the range of impacts observed - the chapter on physiology in particular contained much recent material that was new to me. The latter two chapters in this section are more methodological in nature, reviewing approaches used for future projections of abundance and distribution respectively. Like the chapters in section two, they do so with reference to much new and recent material, usefully highlighting challenges of scale and propagating uncertainty, but I did wonder if these chapters would really have fitted in better in that section. Given the title of the section on population consequences, I also felt that an overview of the evidence of the impacts of climate change on bird populations across the world would have made a useful addition.The final section of the book, entitled interspecific effects of climate change, puts birds in a wider ecological context. Two of the chapters consider particular mechanisms of climate change impacts, covering host-parasite and predator-prey interactions, whilst a third also covers aspects of relationships with other taxa. Both the host-parasite and predator-prey chapters included some really nice recent examples, the first in my opinion being something of a neglected topic, whilst the latter provided a nice overview of what is now a really quite extensive literature. The next chapter is a succinct summary of the impacts of climate change on bird communities, summarising what is really some of the most compelling evidence of impacts to date. Finally in this section, an ambitious chapter gives a pretty comprehensive assessment of the attempts that have been made to assess the future vulnerability of birds to climate change, and considers how best conservationists should respond.For anyone wanting to get up to speed with the topic, or even for those more familiar with the subject but struggling to keep up with the literature, I would heartily recommend this book. As a result of being an edited volume, it does suffer from a degree of duplication between some chapters whilst other aspects of the subject were hardly covered at all, but in general the chapters are excellent and in combination they provide a pretty comprehensive summary. I would have welcomed more of a synthesis from the book editors to pull out key themes and patterns across the chapters and sections. Their concluding chapter was pretty short and given their experience, felt like a lost opportunity to provide more of a challenging synthesis of the subject. Having said that, I would agree with the five main areas of future research need that they highlight, so do go and read this book, and be inspired to tackle at least one of these!Book reviewed by James Pearce-Higgins 

John Meed Softback https://www.nhbs.com/de/a-haven-for-farmland-birds-book £ 159 11.99 2022 Independent Publishing Network 9781800688216 Paul Noyes