Entries for all the birds of Europe, including rare vagrants, describing features of identification, habits and habitat, and calls and songs are accompanied by distribution maps
Roger Tory Peterson was an American naturalist, ornithologist, artist, and educator, and held to be one of the founding inspirations for the 20th century environmental movement.
This 1983 edition is in the old (I'll call low-budget) format of the original Peterson field guides, with color plates all collected and put in the center of the book, away from the associated text which is printed on cheaper paper. At least there are colored range maps (as opposed to the text descriptions of range used by really old field guides), but they are all stowed inconveniently at the end. This archaic layout is so unhelpful that I never used this book, opting for Hermann Heinzel's very fine field guide of the same vintage. Peterson's has since been updated to the newer layout.
I bought this for a recent trip to Europe.The bool is adequate. The pictures are accurate but the maps and some of the distribution in seem to need updating. There is one Czechoslovakia, though the Velvet Divorce was 20 years ago. Several species that were rather common where I went (Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Munich) appear to be far removed from those locales acccording to the maps.
providing the names in multiple languages was helpful.