Customer Reviews

Gulls, Second Edition: A Guide to Identification (Natural World)

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This is it: this book will enable you to master the gulls. This book, and hundreds or thousands of hours studying the birds, that is. Gulls are a pain, and no book can change that. But Grant does a good job spelling out everything you're going to need to figure out. The hundreds of photographs (inappropriate for a field guide, but perfect for a supplemental guide) are themselves a reason to buy this book: they're not art, but they will show you how much you can and sometimes cannot tell the various species apart.

It's actually a shame this is the best gull book there is, because the focus is very British. Species that do not occur in Europe or Asia get reduced treatment (those from western North America) or none at all (those that are normally confined to the Southern Hemisphere). So the description of, say, the Yellow-footed Gull is adequate, Thayer's Gull inadequate, and some Latin American species that stray occasionally to the U.S., nonexistent. But with the exception of the Thayer's Gull the book deals very well with the more difficult problems a North American gull watcher is likely to encounter.

If you think gulls are no fun, Grant isn't going to change your mind. But if you want to tell them apart, get this book.

I think Olsen and Larsson's Gulls of North America, Europe and Asia has just eclipsed Grant's book as the premier Gull guide but Grant is still excellent and in some ways better. Grant has excellent writren descriptions for identification purposes but the individual species accounts are far more detailed in Olsen and Larsson. That might not be of importance to all that just want a gull guide, the critical difference is in the illustrations. Grant has fewer illustrations, all in black and white, Oleson and Larsson have colored illustrations and show more plummages.

I do like this book better for comparisons with the black and white illustrations. For example it is much easier to compare juvenile Little Gull, Black-legged Kittiwake, Ross's Gull, and Sabine's Gull in Grant than in the larger Oleson and Larsson as this book groups them together in one section.

Both of these books are better classified as reference books rather than field guides but this book is slighter and easier to carry around to the lake or seashore than Oleson and Larsson.

This is an excellent book and very worthwhile to have if you are willing to work on gull identification.