As a lifelong feather collector and researcher using feather analyses for peregrine diet studies, I am always drawn to detailed feather resources. Feathers offer invaluable insights beyond diet studies, including bird strike identification, evolutionary relationships, aging and even species discovery. They are also simply beautiful. 

The Atlas of Feathers for Western Palearctic Birds series is a particularly exciting development. This first volume, while primarily text-based, provides a comprehensive introduction to feather characteristics across all global bird families, detailing wing and tail feather counts and other key features such as the gaps or slots in feathers (emarginations); the sort you might see throughout detailed identification books used for bird ringing. I was slightly confused by the fact the introduction covers all the world’s families even though the title is focused on Western Palearctic Birds; however, it means the book potentially has a much wider use. 

The book features high quality scans of sets of feathers laid out in the pattern and sequence you would find them on the real bird. While I would have appreciated more photos in this introductory book, I understand it is laying the foundations for subsequent books in the series. Those shown mostly feature aberrations in the number of wing or tail feathers occasionally found birds such as Swift and Woodcock. However, several pages feature scans of the wing and tail feathers of hummingbirds and other species such as Wallcreeper and Siskin. They offer a glimpse and taster to the stunning visual detail promised in subsequent volumes, which will focus just on Western Palearctic species.

Online resources like Featherbase – which are in some way linked to this book series – are an excellent go to. So why the need to produce a comprehensive series of books? I feel there is still something invaluable about having a real book in the hand, that goes into even more detail than a website ever can and enables a researcher like me to flick through intently, both from an aesthetical and scientific perspective. 

The series promises to be a visually rich and indispensable tool for researchers, birders and anyone fascinated by feathers.

Reviewed by

Ed Drewitt