I got the recently published two volume "ID Handbook of European Birds" by Nils van Duivendijk .
Once upon a time, photographs were useless for bird ID books because:
1, some bird species have a lot of variation between individuals, and the paintings used for bird ID books chose "typical" features rather than painting a specific bird, A photograph of an individual bird could easily be atypical of many other individuals and,
2. Photographs, especially of birds in flight were often of poor quality, and didn't necessarily capture key ID features.
But these two volumes along with the "Wildguides" Britain's Birds book use only photographs (there are a few other books available). Usually they offer multiple photographs of each species showing birds of each sex, at different ages and at different times of the year.
From a photographic point of view this makes them really useful because:
1. When keywording, these photo based books add considerably to the traditional painting based ID guides when trying to identify a tricky bird. Sometimes, when none of my other ID guides help, I can find an "exact" match from one of the photo-based guides.
2. Although, there is nothing "creative" about the photographs in these books, just browsing the hundreds (actually thousands) of technically excellent bird photographs shows you how far bird photography has come in recent years.
As an aside, the "WildGuides" dragonfly book is also particularly useful for Identifying dragonflies in photographs taken in the field.
I gather some people don't.
