Get to know the birds around you.

This guide is arranged the way a field manual is: one page to a species, with the plain facts given first — length, wingspan, habitat, range, diet and voice — before the longer notes on telling it apart from its neighbours. Read the measurements before the plumage. A bird on a wire forty metres away rarely shows the colour an illustration promises, but it will show its proportions, its wing length and how it holds its tail, and that is what the numbers describe.

Entries are gathered into nine divisions: raptors, songbirds, waterfowl, seabirds, waders, woodpeckers, owls, hummingbirds, and pigeons and doves. The grouping does real work before you open a page. A bird running the waterline on long legs, stopping to probe the mud, is a wader, not a duck; a bird climbing a trunk with two toes forward and two back is a woodpecker, whatever its colour. Go from division to shape, then to field marks.

If you are new to this, start with ground you already know. Watch the same window, or walk the same path, once a week through a season, and learn the dozen species there properly rather than two hundred badly. Note what a bird was doing and how it sounded, not only how it looked: behaviour and call often settle an identification when light and distance will not.