Murray Lord
10/04/97 08:58
When I was in Europe last year I used Lars Jonsson's Birds of Europe with
North Africa and the Middle East. General opinion over there was that it
was the best available guide for Europe. It sells for 16 pounds paperback
in the UK. If you can get it here it will probably be over $50.
I had two main criticisms. The plates vary in quality. Some, like the
waders, are excellent, but others (like the pregnant looking woodpeckers)
are not as good. Also, the cross indexing wasn't good. You'd want a
picture of a bird in flight, and find nothing in the index, but then find a
page of flight pictures half an hour later ten pages away. I guess that
would be no problem once you were more familiar with the book, but better
indexing would have avoided it. Having said that the text was first rate,
and I would recommend it.
As to Norway and Sweden, there is a book called Where to Watch Birds in
Scandinavia by Gustaf Aulen (17 pounds in UK). I have it but have never
had the opportunity to use it. It details lots of sites in each country,
but it is the sort of book that tells you how to get to a particular park
and what you might see there rather than what areas of the park to go to
for which species. You could probably order both these books through the
Natural History Book Service on the internet.
For other ideas on Europe, have a look at the Wings home page [
www.widdl.com/wings/] for detailed itineraries of tours that Sunbird
operates in Europe.
Murray Lord
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