Warblers of Europe, Asia, and North Africa

Rating:
Summary: What an omission!
Review: In the same series as the Helm ID guides to bird families, a series that is apparently beating Handbook of Birds of the World in being the first to catalogue Passerines in detail this book like others in the series apparently offers a breadth of coverage including illustrations and species accounts but the volume is seriously flawed compared to all the rest.

It has chosen to avoid references to food and feeding except where considered essential to illustrate a point of habit. For a book that could never be used as a field guide as it is more taxonomic in coverage rather than geographical, this omission represents a grave error by the publishers. All the other volumes cover details of food and I can only say that the authors were lazy. They have no excuse.

They seem to think we the readers already know that warblers are insectivorous, but this fact is not really stated in the introduction to compensate for the omission. Hence this book is more a taxonomic list, not a monograph of the family. It perhaps ignores breeding as well (I was researching them for food details) - very very disappointing for a large group of birds not adequately covered elsewhere at the time of writing.