A field guide to the waders of Britain and Europe with North Africa and the Middle East

A detailed study of an absorbing group with over 300 paintings in colour; 100 drawings and maps. Waders are surely one of the most attractive and fascinating groups of the world's birds. The majority of the species comprise two large cosmopolitan families: Chara-driidae (plovers) and Scolopacidae (sandpipers, snipes etc.) This book deals with 87 out of the world's 214 species, and covers an area west of the Urals, south to the Caspian and round the western border of Iran down to Kuwait, then westwards to include the eastern Mediterranean and northern coast of Africa, south to the Banc d'Arguin, Mauritania. This is an unusual field guide in that it concentrates on a single bird group in a single area. The standard bird guides cannot stop to give special treatment to a group which, though difficult, comprises less than 15% of our avifauna. The magist¬erial world survey of Shore Birds by Marchant, Prater and Hayman, on the other hand - an exemplary reference book which we cannot recommend too highly to every birdwatcher - is necessarily concerned largely with other species never seen in Europe. And the relevant volume of the comprehensive Birds of the Western Pale-arctic (with some wader paintings also by Philip Burton), is not a book for use out-of-doors.We therefore offer this guide to the birdwatcher in the hope that it may solve some problems in the field and at the same time perhaps stimulate further research. It describes and illustrates all breeding waders in Britain, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, all regular visitors, and the odd rarity. Short accounts of the birds' life-histories have also been included. There has been a new impetus in wader field studies during the last decade, but there is still a great deal to discover even about the more common species and the enormous journeys they undertake annually between breeding grounds in arctic tundra or mountain-fells and overwintering areas on estuaries, shingly shores and mud-flats.