Bird Atlas 2007-11 The breeding and wintering birds of Britain & Ireland

My copy of this outstanding, weighty tome was delivered yesterday evening and has been well worth the wait. It must weigh around 10 kilos! Hard bound with 720 pages.

• The book is the result of contributions from over 40,000 volunteers and a total financial investment of £1.4 million.
• The advent of online data capture means that this atlas captured 10 times more data than any previous national atlas. It includes over 16 million individual observations of 214 million birds of 502 species.
• Advances in mapping and modelling technologies have enabled the BTO to pull even more meaning from the data - species accounts include new maps that are easy to interpret and will be even more useful to a broader range of users.
• Over 8,000 copies of the book have already been sold, so this looks like being the best-selling BTO book of all time.
• The book highlights some really striking changes to our bird populations over a worryingly short time frame, particularly the breeding abundance change maps for migrant passerines, waders and farmland birds. We need to understand these changes better and we need to do this fast - before it is too late.

Every serious birder should have a copy of this momentous work in their library.