This is the first comprehensive guide to these closely related families.

The book covers all 75 wrens, 34 thrashers and 5 dippers, almost all of which are New World species.

The wrens (Troglodytidae) in particular display great diversity, occupying almost every kind of habitat in the Americas. The family probably originates in Central America where the greatest number of species is to be found.

The thrashers (Mimidae) include the mockingbirds, catbirds and tremblers. The dippers (Cinclidae) are river specialists although, unusually, they exhibit no obvious features for an aquatic existence.

David Brewer was born in Worcestershire, England. He read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and received his PhD, in Heterocyclic Chemistry, from Glasgow, Scotland. After a fellowship at the University of Arizona, Tucson, he emigrated to Canada where he worked as an industrial research chemist. He started bird watching at the age of eleven, and backyard bird ringing at fourteen. He has watched birds on all seven continents, but his main area interests are the study and conservation of birds of South and Central America, and also bird banding.

His publications include Wrens, Dippers and Thrashers (Helm, 2001), Where to Watch Birds in Central America and the Caribbean (with Nigel Wheatley), (Helm, 2002), the four-volume Canadian Atlas of Bird Banding (Canadian Wildlife Service, 2001-2010), and contributions to three volumes of the Handbook of the Birds of the World (Lynx, 2005-2010). He has, for more than twenty-five years, been a Research Associate in Ornithology from the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.