Book Review: Macdonald and Barrett: Mammals of Britain and Europe

David Macdonald and Priscilla Barrett
Collins, 1993
Over 1000 illustrations
ISBN 0002197790

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This is a handsome and useful field guide as we've come to expect from Collins. Apart from the beautiful and clear colour plates, there are helpful line drawings illustrating typical behaviours of the species in the text, and detailed distribution maps.

The text is strictly organized to provide species name (in English and Latin, with the etymology of the latin name), status, recognition, habitat, habits, breeding, measurements and general description. The colour plates illustrate skulls, footprints, droppings and other signs as appropriate. This is very helpful as signs are often all one sees of this secretive group of animals.

Whales and Bats are groups especially hard to identify; this book breaks new ground by providing precise details of their calls in terms of frequency (audible with a bat detector) and other features such as duration and type of sound.

The book is wonderfully comprehensive and difficult to fault, except perhaps that it would be nice to have species names in other European languages to help when discussing sightings!