This guide to what can be a confusing group of birds is an essential addition to any serious birder's library: an excellent tool for identifying pipit species and wagtail subspecies, particularly when bird watching abroad.

Pipits and Wagtails is a small enough book that it can easily be taken on overseas excursions and even fits into a small rucksack for taking into the field. At the same time this publication contains an enormous amount of information on distribution, identification, plumage variations, moult, wing formulas, calls and taxonomic status. The book is split into four main sections; a short introduction discussing general aspects of classification, identification, ageing and sexing of pipits and wagtails; 30 colour plates; over 300 pages of species accounts; a photographic section: each section is useful to birders.

When this book was published in 2003 it was the most up-to-date account of pipits and wagtails based on the most recent research. However, one of the things that appeals to me about this book is that at times the authors simply admit to not yet fully understanding the taxonomic status of some subspecies and give an explanation of their current grouping/splitting whilst speculating on what further research may reveal.

One of the small complains I would have avout this book is that the plates, species accounts and photographs being in three different sections makes for rather a lot of flicking back and forwards when researching a species. This, I suppose, is because the authors wanted to have the species illustrated next to each other, something that is important with hard to identify species, but why the photos can't be with the plates I don't know.

One ommission I noticed and was rather disappointed with is the lack of winter plumage illustrations for the various subspecies of Yellow Wagtail, something which is a serious problem for usage of this book on this species' wintering grounds.

Despite these small issues, this is one of the best Helm guides I have seen and birders throughout the world would do well to add it to their collection. Certainly birdersthroughout the world can learn a lot about pipit and wagtail identification from this.