It describes all the bird species reliably recorded in the wild in Europe and adjacent geographical areas with similar fauna, giving their worldwide distribution, variations in appearance and migratory movements.

The pioneering ornithological work of John Ray and Francis Willughby in the seventeenth century had introduced an effective classification system based on anatomical features, and a dichotomous key to help readers identify birds.

Birds of Europe was well received by its contemporary reviewers, although a commentator in 2018 considered that Dresser's outdated views and the cost of his books meant that in the long run his works had limited influence.

Early ornithologies, such as those of Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi and Pierre Belon, relied for much of their content on the authority of Aristotle and the teachings of the church,[1][2] and included much extraneous material relating to the species, such as proverbs, references in history and literature, or its use as an emblem.

[10] The commercial success of the Ornithology is unknown, but it was historically significant,[11] influencing writers including René Réamur, Mathurin Jacques Brisson, Georges Cuvier and Carl Linnaeus in compiling their own works.

[24] In 1863 and 1864, during the American Civil War, Dresser travelled to North America, setting up shop in the Mexican border town of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, to sell goods that had evaded the Union blockade to the Confederacy.

[d][25] He made the most of the opportunity to add to his bird collection while there, as he did later when he relocated to San Antonio, Texas, where he met the prominent American ornithologist Adolphus Lewis Heermann.

Articles for each species included alternative binomial names, a detailed description of both sexes and the juveniles, the bird's range, habitat and habits, and the specimens that had been examined during preparation of the text.

[39] The taxonomy used by Dresser was based on a scheme created by Thomas Henry Huxley and developed by Philip Sclater which used a hierarchical classification using orders and families rather than the arbitrary division into bird groups used by earlier writers.

Sharpe resigned as librarian of the Zoological Society late in 1871 to give himself more opportunity to write, but then accepted a post as bird curator at the British Museum in May 1872.

Dresser had also extended the area covered beyond Europe and the Middle East to include neighbouring Persia and western Central Asia, which added many birds from that region.

[43] Although this was more technically difficult, drawing directly could give a livelier feel to the final illustration, and was also favoured by other contemporary bird artists such as Edward Lear.

[g][43] When he came to review Birds of Europe in 1872, Dresser's old friend Alfred Russel Wallace recommended the work both to general readers and to amateurs, using the latter word in its original sense as a lover of the subject.

"[46] An outspoken critic of the book was Dresser's former friend, the ornithologist Henry Seebohm, who criticised the errors in the text and the conservatism of the authors, including their failure to use trinomial nomenclature.

[47] His comments on Dresser and Sharpe include: ... the writer of the extraordinary article in question was absolutely ignorant of everything connected with the Greenshank except the information which a series of skins might afford ...

[48] and ... as acts of ignorance and folly on the part of two juvenile ornithologists who had nothing new to say on the birds of which they wrote, and consequently made a desperate effort to achieve notoriety by introducing novelties into nomenclature ...

[42][54] When Dresser died in 1915 aged 77 his obituary in Ibis, an avian science journal, after summarising his life and his major role in scientific societies, went on to say his "most important work is undoubtedly the well-known 'History of the Birds of Europe' ... the whole forms a monument of the industry and accuracy of the author."

[56] The ornithologist Alan Knox commented in 2018 that Dresser's outdated classification scheme and the cost of his books meant that, in the long run, his works were less influential than William Yarrell's 1843 A History of British Birds.

[57] Eventually Dresser's "old guard" views fell out of favour, particularly after World War I,[58] although his book still attracts the interest of collectors, with first-edition full sets being offered in late 2019 for $27,500 in the US[59] and £19,642 in the UK.

[50] Throughout his adult life Dresser regularly wrote articles for journals, most frequently The Zoologist and Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, although the History of the Birds of Europe was his first book.

[33] The Manual of Palaearctic Birds was largely traditional in its taxonomy, as with its predecessor, but in his treatment of dippers he showed a partial acceptance that subspecies could share a common ancestor, as proposed by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species.