Detailed profiles and reference articles covering individual bird species, families, and closely related groups. Where the Local Birds section starts from a place, this section starts from the birds themselves.
The guides here work through a group and lay out its members side by side: the twenty-three types of blackbirds in the Icteridae family, the twenty-one teal ducks, the twenty-nine ibises, the seventeen eagle-owls, the kites, the lapwings. Grouping birds this way makes the comparisons that matter easiest to see, because the species most likely to be confused with one another are almost always close relatives standing in the same part of the family tree.
Each group guide covers what unites its members and, more usefully, what separates them — size and structure, bill shape, plumage pattern, voice, range and habitat preference. Functional groupings appear here too, where birds that are not related nonetheless share a way of life: scavenging birds that feed on carrion, for instance, drawn from several unrelated families.
Individual species accounts give a fuller treatment of a single bird: how to recognise it, where and when it occurs, how it behaves, and which species it is most often mistaken for.
Photographs throughout show the plumages you are likely to meet, including immature and female birds where these differ from the adult male that usually illustrates a field guide. Photographer credits appear in the image captions.
Use this section when you know roughly what kind of bird you are looking at and want to narrow it down within the group, or when you want to understand a family properly rather than identify one bird.
