I had been looking for rabbits lately, because of this: the cat had switched to hanging out by the upstairs window, the better to observe the just arriving Juncos (snow birds, it is fall). She had previously spent most of her time observing rabbits from the lower, ground level windows, until just the other day when, rather suddenly, all the rabbits disappeared. Until then, there was always a rabbit or two. In fact, the entire city had been recently invaded by rabbits, according to several reports, and now they seemed to be disappearing quickly. This, I assume, means that the coyotes finally got busy. Or, an epidemic of tularemia. Either way, something happened.

I once had a cat that was partly outdoors on Cape Cod. Well, the cat was indoors, but would escape. We’d go looking for it and always find it in a bush (a different bush every time) surrounded by no rabbits. All the other bushes would have rabbits nearby. But not the one with the cat in it. (Until, again, the coyotes showed up and ruined the rabbit-test method of finding the cat!)

Have you seen the film Dead Birds? See it if you can. This is a very important ethnographic film, of the old style, by Gardner, of a place in Highland New Guinea. Part of the story actually has to do with live birds, not dead ones, and how they are used by sentries at the outskirts if the village lands, during times of conflict, to detect the arrival of enemy combatants. You watch the birds, and you are watching the hidden predators.

Or you can listen to them. Or you can listen to the monkeys. Anything with an alarm call. I could engage you with story after story, if you and I both had the time, of finding very interesting and elusive critters out in the bush, mainly in Africa, by following up on the predator avoidance behavior of primates or birds.

And, this brings us to what I think is one of the best bird books ever.

What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young is an exploration of nature based on this premise: the robin knows everything about its environment, and this information is regularly conveyed via the bird’s call, or its behavior. By observing that behavior or understanding the robin’s vocalizations, you can poach that information and also know a lot about the immediate environment, which may be your own back yard, the area near your camping site, the wooded gully the enemy may approach you by, or a nearby park.

And, of course, it isn’t just the robin, it is all the animals including birds, insects, and everything else. But Young is talking about birds, and it is certainly true that in most or possibly all habitats, it is the birds that, owing to their diurnal and highly visible and sound oriented nature, are telling you all this information about your mutual surroundings as well as about the bird itself.

To me, birding (and nature watching in general) is not so much about lengthening one’s list (though that is always fun) but, rather, about observing and understanding behavior. Young explores this, teaches a great deal about it, and places this mode of observation in the context of countless stories, or potential stories, about the world you are sharing with the birds you are watching.

This is a four or five dimensional look at a multidimensional world. Lucky for us humans, as primates, we share visual and audio modalities, and mostly ignore odor, and we have overlapping ranges in those modalities (to varying degrees). But birds fly (most of them, anyway) and are small and fast and there are many of them. In many places we live, we are the only diurnal visually-oriented non-bird. Indeed, while I’m sure my cat communes with the rabbits at a level I can’t possibly understand, I’m pretty sure I get the birds in ways she could not possibly get her paws around. (Which is why we don’t let her out of the house. She would prefer to eat them, rather than appreciate them!)

From the publisher, about the author:

Growing up near the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, Jon Young studied as a tracker and naturalist. For three decades, he has taught and mentored children and adults, combining Native skills practiced worldwide with the tools of modern field ecology, emphasizing the nearly lost art of understanding bird and animal language. The founder of OWLink Media, 8 Shields Institute, and the Shikari Tracking Guild, he consults with programs around the world. Jon has written or produced numerous books, audio, and multimedia projects. His website is www.birdlanguage.com. Married with six children, he lives in the woods above Santa Cruz, California.

Lots of science in this book, well documented and referenced. Simple black and white but very engaging graphics. So far my favorite bird book of the year.

Clay writes the popular “Birdman of Lauderdale” column for the Saint Paul Park Bugle, and leads birdwatching field trips in the Twin Cities area.

This is a collection of updated and edited essays from that publication, most about bird watching, or the birds themselves. Is it OK to hate cowbirds? What is it like to witness the takeoff of a mob of cranes? How do birdwatchers find birds anyway? What is bird banding all about? These and other burning questions are addressed in engagingly written snippets.

I really enjoyed this book. If you are a bird watcher, or thinking about becoming a bird watcher, you will enjoy this book. Or, maybe you are looking for the perfect gift for someone who is into birds, especially in the upper midwest or plains.

1) A pocket field guide of the critters of a reasonably circumscribed geographical area, like the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America. This is a small book that can fit in a big pocket, and a classic guide like this one is something you’ll want to have with you while bird watching in the eastern or central US.

2) A big book, not suitable for pockets, of the critters of a reasonably circumscribed geographical area. A great example of this is The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds . It covers the same geographical area as the aforementioned Peterson guide, but the book’s authors and publishers sacrifice portability for other characteristics like richness of detail and more book real estate for many more images.

3) A book, larger or smaller, that focuses on a specific geographical area but covers most of the visible wildlife including, often, plants, and maybe including additional information for the traveller. A recent example of this is the just published Wildlife of the Galapagos.

4) A book that covers a large taxonomic group, but over a vast geographical area. Carnivores of the World is an example of this. It covers all of the non-aquatic carnivores, everywhere on the planet. This particular book is a pocket field guide, but in a way that is kind of funny because you’d have be on quite a trip to need a pocket guide for the Earth for a given type of animal. I quickly add, however, that while it might seem a bit silly, the Carnivores of the World is actually a fantastic book.

The book, Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia: An Identification Guide, by Sébastien Reeber, overlaps with some of these categories. The title could be rewritten to say “Temperate and Subtropical Waterfowl of the Northern Hemisphere,” though that would be a bit misleading because a large percentage of these birds migrate long distances, so really, it is more like “Waterfowl of the world except the ones that stay in the tropics or otherwise don’t migrate north of the tropics,” but that would be a silly title.

Also, Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia: An Identification Guide is large format. The up and down and back and forth dimensions are not as large as Crossley’s bird guides, but it is way bigger than a field guide, and thick … 656 pages. The plates start on page 32 and the detailed text and photograph rich species accounts run from pages 177 to 616, to give you an idea of the balance and expansiveness found in this volume.

This book is organized in a unique way. There are two main parts. First, 72 plates show peterson-style drawings of all of the birds that are covered, with the drawings arranged on the right side, with basic ID information, range maps, and references to other parts of the book on the left side. This allows the user to find a particular bird fairly quickly. Importantly, the pictures cover both sex and age variations.

The second part of the book significantly expands on the plates, and is cross referenced by plate number, with extensive text and multiple photographs to add very rich detail.

So, when it comes to your preference for drawings vs. photographs, you can have your cake and eat it too. Also, when it comes to your need for a basic field guide vs. a more in depth discussion, you can have your cake and eat it too there as well.

Aside from these two main sections there are sections on how to use the book, basics of taconomy and systematics, the physical anatomy of birds and how that relates to identification, important information on moulting and plumage variation as well as age and sex, which as you probably know are key in identifying waterfowl because this varies so much. There is an extensive section on hybrids, which, again, is a big deal with many waterfowl, and a very large number of hybrids are addressed in the book. (There is a separate hybrid index.)

The book is extremely well produced and presented. I love this book.

Since Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia: An Identification Guide is brand new, if you’ve got a birder friend or relative with a birthday coming up soon, this is the perfect gift. Meanwhile, migrations are underway. You need this book now.

I hope I won’t disappoint you … this is not about John Ashcroft. It is about golden eagles (actually, maybe its about one golden eagle in particular).

A timely repost.

The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) has been in decline for a very long time, so you may not know it formerly bred in a much wider range of habitats, across the entire U.S. Today it is known as a mountain eagle because this is where it is generally found, at least in North America. Any experienced birder will tell you that in places like Minnesota nine out of ten, or maybe 99 out of 100 golden eagle sightings are immature bald eagles.

Last winter my wife, Amanda, and daughter, Julia and I attended a talk (on owls) at the Minnesota Raptor Center in Falcon Heights. While there we took a tour through the facility, where several captive birds are kept. Some of these birds are in rehab and will be released, others are permanent residents because of some major disability. As we were shown around, the gracious and knowledgeable volunteer told us “Golden Eagles are not native to Minnesota. You never see them here. We get a lot of people telling us they saw a golden eagle, but I guarantee you it is always an immature bald….” And at that moment we were directed around a corner to see, in all it’s glory, a majestic golden eagle in one of the enclosures. Now, this was just after the “all our birds are brought here by our people or game officers from locations all over Minnesota” speech, so I said … “Well, there’s one there … in that cage … a golden eagle. There must be some of them in Minnesota.” I was trying not to be snide, really. The volunteer made some sort of apologies for the eagle being there, admitted it was brought in from a site in Minnesota, but stuck to her story that there are no golden eagles in the state. Whatever.

Julia, who at the time was 10, is quite an aficionado of the raptors and is pretty good at identifying them. Earlier in the year, during the summer, she pointed out to me three bald eagles and a golden eagle flying over an island in a Cass County lake. I told her “Well, you know, most golden eagles are actually immature ba…” “No kidding, dad,” she interrupted. “But really, look at the three bald eagles and the golden flying over the trees on Horseshoe Island…”

I have to admit, I could not see any of them too well … no binoculars and they were pretty far away … but the “golden” was much bigger than the others … and kind of flew differently. But they quickly passed beyond the tree line and I got distracted with other things, so I can’t count this as a confirmed sighting.

But I was diligent in coming weeks to make sure that Julia understood that this was a common mistake, and that it did no one any good to label an immature bald as a golden. The bird was the bird that it was. Correct identification is very important, and it is better to say “I don’t know” than to be definitive about something you are not really sure of. I reminded her of the time her schoolmate came up to the lake with us, and on seeing a flock of crows, exclaimed: “Look, a flock of hawks.” We were polite and merely exchanged glances, but we felt the pain of embarrassment. No, Julia, misidentification is an honest mistake but one we must work diligently to overcome. There are no golden eagles in Minnesota … that’s what they said at the raptor center … so a sighting of one of these birds would be very meaningful. Let’s get it right. And so on and so forth.

I started going to this location … my wife’s family cabin … two summers ago, and we have spent a lot of time there. Last spring we made a vow to spend as much time at the cabin as we could over spring/summer/fall. We kept our promise to ourselves and have been there quite a bit. In fact, we were there last weekend, and saw much to our surprise two bald eagles. There is very little open water anywhere nearby, so I would have thought they’d have gone down the Mississippi or to the Great Lakes, but there they were on the second weekend in January reeling over the treetops near Longville Minnesota.

But I digress. Over these last couple of years, we have watched a nesting pair of bald eagles launch into adulthood one offspring and start to raise another. There are a few nesting pairs in the area, so we see adult and juvenile bald eagles quite often. It is impossible to distinguish among individuals, so when we see one or a pair we cannot always tell if it is “ours.” But if we ever feel inclined to see a bald eagle, all we have to do is walk to the end of the dock and turn left, and one or two are almost always there, on the nest, near the nest, or perched on a nearby tree looking over the water. If they are not there it usually suffices to scan the skies and there will be an eagle soaring or fishing. Sometimes they make themselves even more obvious, like one day in November when one of the eagles took down a flying great blue heron, grabbing it by the leg, the two reeling to just above the lake surface when the eagle let go. Joined by it’s mate, the two eagles harassed the heron for quite some time thereafter.

So, one of the the late season weekends last summer, Amanda and I were sitting on the deck in front of the cabin when we saw an eagle approaching from a great distance. The bird was flying hard against a strong southerly wind (we were looking north) so as it flapped its wings it did not make a lot of progress. This meant we could see it for a very long time, get out the binoculars, watch it approach and eventually fly right over head in slow motion. It was very large. As it approached, it became clear that this was an eagle, but lacking adult bald eagle markings. Ninety nine out of a hundred times this would be an immature bald, but it simply did not look like an immature bald. It’s wings did not flap as I expected a Bald Eagle’s to flap. On first seeing the bird I thought … “This is not an eagle, maybe a heron or something” but as it got closer, there was no doubt. Amanda and I exchanged comments and opinions. “I hate to say it, but that looks like a golden.” “You know, 99 out of 100 times it’s an immature bald.” “Yeah, but the only immature bald we are seeing these days is sitting on that tree over there alarm calling.” “Right, but you know, at the raptor center, you know, but the immature balds … they look like goldens…”

Then, as the huge golden bird struggling with measured effort against the southerly fetch soared directly overhead, the bald eagles and loons crying out in alarm, Amanda said the words that made the most sense:

“Greg, we know what an immature bald eagle looks like. We see them all the time. That is not an immature bald eagle.”

So, I’m figuring it was a chickadee….. (just to be safe).

Everybody needs a basic field guide. If you need more than one field guide because you are a family of birders, or because you like to keep one in the car and one by the feeder, than make your second (and third?) guides different from your first, because there will be plenty of times you will want to look something up in more than one place. A field guide is a good starting point, but the “How to be a birder” section includes books that you will be very glad you read once you read them, and if you are going to pick one “how to” book for yourself or as a gift, make it the Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding. If you know a young person getting interested in birding, the National Geographic Birding Essentials is essential, and if they are in the Eastern US, the Young Birder’s Guide is perfect.

I’ve not covered bird song here, other than the one, rather spectacular iBook.

Field and Identification Guides

• Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guides) and related guides by Peterson (depending on your area) is still, in my opinion, the number one essential guide.
• The Kaufman Field Guide and the Smithsonian Field Guides are excellent second books, following the rule that if you are a birding family and don’t share well, get multiple guides but make them all different from one another.
• The Crossley ID Guide to Eastern Birds is too big to be a field pocketbook but too good, in the way the birds are presented, to not be one of your key books for birding in the region.
• Birds of North America and Greenland is a new guide to supplement the usual guides, covering the western edge of North America and Greenland in more detail than the usual. Maritime and New England birders need this one.

How to be a birder

• National Geographic’s Birding Essentials is for the new birder, covering how birding works, how to use bird guides, etc.
• The Young Birder’s Guide to Birds in Eastern North America is a field guide with help on how to go birding for kids about middle school age.
• How to Be a Better Birder is a more advanced guide but quite accessible to the noobie.
• The Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding … if you don’t have this book you’re doin’ it rong.

Categorial Guides

• Hawks at a distance is a unique approach to bird identification using long distance photos and a “whole bird” approach.
• Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America falls between the categorial category (a particular type of bird is covered) and academic books.

Regional Bird Guides Outside the US

• South Africa: Birds of Southern Africa is a classic now out in a new edition. Highly recommended.
• South Africa: I discuss two other Southern Africa guides here.
• Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives
• Birds of Central Asia
• Cotingas and Manakins covers a major South and Central American class of birds, is a very new book and is rather spectacular.
• Antarctic Wildlife: A visitor’s Guide is not just birds, but it includes the birds you’d be likely to see on an organized tour of the Southern Continent.
• Birds of the West Indies
• Birds of Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire
• The Birds of New Jersey: Status and Distribution

Academic or Topically General Books About Birds

• The Birder’s Handbook is not new but it is fantastic, all about bird ecology and behavioral biology and stuff.
• The Atlas of Birds addresses diversity, behavior, and conservation of birds world wide.
• Bird Migration and Global Change
• How birds migrate
• Three academic books on bird migration
• Avian Architecture: How birds design, engineer, and build is a spectacular overview of bird nesting and related behaviors.
• Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds is a high priced academic book that includes a series of scientific studies of bird evolution from Dinosaurs to more recent times.

Bird Song (and more)

• Music of the Birds Volume 1 is an experimental book, in iAuthored iBook format, focusing on a handful of selected species in Eastern North America.

Children’s Books

• On the wing: American Birds in Migration
• How Birds Fly

Also, don’t forget to read ALL of my posts at 10,000 birds! There’s some other good posts there too.

(Full disclosure, I write for National Geographic’s Science Blogs, sure, but really, I have nothing to do with this book. I didn’t even get it as review copy, someone gave it to me for Christmas last year.)

As you know, in the beginning of almost every bird guide is a chapter (or two) on how to do the whole birding thing, some more extensive and some less extensive. The most extensive and useful for the novice that I know of is the front matter in The Young Birder’s Guide, which I highly recommend for middle school or so aged potential birders. Well, Birding Essentials is like that first chapter but in the form of a whole book. Here’s what you need to do to see if you should get a copy of this book and spend a few hours with it. Look at the following list of topics and see if you feel like you know enough about most of them, or not:

<li>Binoculars, how to chose one and how to use them.</li>

<li>Field guide basics, how to use them, etc.</li>

<li>Understanding status and distribution of a bird species</li>

<li>Details and terminology of migration, nesting, and other patterns of movement and migration

Parts of the bird. Here’s a short list of parts. If you don’t know them, you don’t really know the parts:

<li>

• lores
• eye line
• supercilium
• lesser and greater coverts
• tertials

<li>Colors and patterns.  Bird color terms are atypical.</li>

<li>Methods of identification using field marks</li>

<li>Variation in bird features (sexual dimorphism included)</li>

There’s more, including strategies for approaching the field adventure that is birding, and dealing with rare variants, and so on.

Excellent birdy bedside reading, but mainly for the novice birder. If you work with bird watching in a science classroom, this is probably a good volume to have handy; tell your librarian to get it.

There really are three or four aspects to being a better birder that could be viewed very differently, and we’ve talked about the knowledge-based aspect here before when discussing Kaufmann’s Field Guide to Advanced Birding and one of my favorite bird books, The Birder’s Handbook. In the former, you learn much more about anatomy and behavior that one usually finds in bird guides at the general bird-level, in the latter, more of that but in a much more species specific, and bio-theoretical framework. This makes sense because the former is written by an expert birder, and the latter by biologists.

But now we have a new player on the scene: Derek Lovitch’s How to Be a Better Birder. This is a lovely, well written and pretty well illustrated guide that focuses, in my view, mainly on one thing you can do to improve your birding: Pay attention to and exploit your knowledge of CONTEXT. Seriously. Consider the following chapter headings that represent about half the book: Birding by Habitat, Birding by geography, Birding and Weather, Birding at Night. Place, ecology, location, time of day, conditions. That is all context. Of course, it is not sufficient to tell you to pay attention to context. Lovitch makes the argument for each of these aspects of context, discusses what to look for, what to pay attention to, what to learn more about.

But it isn’t all context, it is also nuts and bolts. Lovitch starts out his discussion with a wonderful example of advanced field identification, in a sense, of a common species, the American Black Duck. Apparently this duck is an occasional visitor to Norway, and while on a birding expedition there, his Norwegian colleagues asked him of numerous details about the duck trying to pin down their own identifications. But, even though Lovitch sees this bird every time he goes outside (they are common where he lives) he really couldn’t honestly answer most of their very detailed questions. So, when he returned to his Maine home, he spent some time very closely studying these ducks, learned a great deal more about their physical features and variation, and even wrote a blog post about it (the true certification that someone is an expert!).

With respect to identification, Lovitch is a believer in the “Whole Bird” approach — his version of this is the “Whole bird and more” approach. This is getting away from the field mark approach and leaning more to the gestalt, with field marks as key tests of the gestalt-generated hypotheses as to what a particular bird is.

I like this book. I think it will help me learn How to Be a Better Birder.

If you are a birder and you are going on Spring Break (from the US), don’t forget that there are birds where you are going. And, probably, there are bird books that cover your destination.

One of the really cool things about North American birding is that when you do go down to tye Yucatan, Caribbean, or Central America you’ll see birds that are migratory and familiar, but in their other home (but just on their way back). They’ll be surprised to see you!

I just got a copy of Birds of Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire, though I’ve got no personal travel plans for Aruba and environs at the moment. This field guide by Bart de Boer, Eric Newton and Robin Restall is small format and uses a Peterson like format with 71 plates of drawings (which are quite good) on one side and brief descriptions on the other. Since the guide covers the three rain forest islands located in the southern Caribbean (near the Venezuelan coast) maps are not really useful, but there is a comprehensive checklist in the back of the book that indicates which of the three islands each bird appears on.

Compared to the other true field guides that cover this area, well, this seems to be the only one. The list price is seemingly a little high at 28 bucks, but it is much cheaper on Amazon. I’ve seen it available from another publisher as well, but I think that may be out of print.

If you happen to be going to the West Indies instead of the southern Caribbean, this other book is the one you want.

Obviously, the best way to pick out a pair of binoculars is to try them out, but in doing so, I strongly urge you to try at least a couple of pairs that are beyond your budget, and work your way down from there. Not knowing what an excellent pair of binoculars is like makes it difficult to judge among the lesser forms that you will ultimately have to pick from. Putting it another way, if all you know is the $50 special, and you use a pair of them for a season or two, then the first time you bring a nice pair up to your eyeballs you’ll realize that you had no clue what you were missing. By trying the higher quality binoculars you will understand the necessity of getting the best pair you can afford. Fortunately, the difference between the $50 binoculars and the $200 binoculars is probably much greater than subsequent increments of several hundred dollars. Truthfully, though, the binoculars you want and can actually afford if you save up, and if good binoculars are really important to you, are probably in the $300 – $500 range.

There are three brands that make, at their top end, birding binoculars that are generally regarded as the best: Zeiss, Leica and Swarovski. As long as you are spending thousands of dollars on the binoculars, you might as well go for the higher end within those brands and the 10x instead of some lesser magnification. For a little over 2,000 you can have: A Zeiss Victory such as the Carl Zeiss Optical Inc Victory RF Binoculars (10×45 T RF); The Swarovski Swarovision (comes in various sizes) such as the Swarovski Optik Swarovision 10X50 Binoculars; or my personal favorite if I owned one, The Leica Ultravid (comes in various sizes) such as the Leica 10×42 Ultravid HD

Since you can’t afford any of those binoculars, and the people who make binoculars know that, there is a series that will cost you probably less than $500 and serve you very well. These are probably as durable and flexible, but without the over-the-top super duper optics, but very close. When I have compared the upper end with this middle end (under in-the-store conditions, mostly) I usually can’t see that much of a difference, but I’m sure it shows up over longer use and under a wider range of settings. The Leica 8×20 BCR/Black Ultravid Compact Binocular is admittedly over $500 usually, but may be the best of the middle range. The Leupold Katmai 8X32Mm Compact Binocular Black 56420 or similar models from the same manufacturer are generally ranked very high. The Nikon 7519 Monarch 12 X 56 MM All-Terrain Binoculars are far from compact but excellent, rugged field binoculars. Also look at the Celestron Ultima binoculars.

At the lower end, all these brands as well as Eagle, Swift, Bushnell and others, make binoculars around $100 – $150. You will notice the difference. There is a good chance you’ll want to have one or two small binoculars to have handy by the back yard window or some other convenient location. For this, just go to your local camping supply store and see what they have on sale. If you go to REI, for instance, they’ll probably have their own brand $50 model which would be based on (or rebranded) Eagle Energy binoculars, or something similar.

We have one pair of fairly nice binoculars that we use all the time, plus three of the small el-cheapos, one in my car (hidden well out of sight lest someone think they are worthy breaking in to filch), and the others at the cabins. My mother in law won a pair of giant field binoculars with the most amazing zoom on them, which she keeps at the cabin, and they work great in certain ranges but otherwise give me a headache and are hard to hold. When there is a bird you want to look at, you’ll be fine with almost anything to bring it in closer. All these options work. But for regular use, you will be much, much happier with the better quality optics from the middle, or dare I say, upper end of the range.

Like the other illustrated checklists, the book is well produced but inexpensive, smallish, designed to provide coverage rather than detail, and to be easy to use. The birds are organized along a commonly used ducks-to-song-bird sequence, descriptions opposite plates, lots of birds on each plate, and maps next to descriptions. I wish the maps were larger.

The illustrations are very well done.

I’m not sure where I’m going to put this book. Up north we have two cabins, and my Peterson guides tend to get mixed up with other people’s Peterson guides, then moved around, so it is not uncommon for me to be in one cabin looking out at some bird and needing the book that is in the other cabin. Perhaps I’ll station Birds of North America and Greenland in one of the cabins in order to avoid writing on a Peterson “Greg’s Book Don’t Touch” or something. And I’ll put it in the eastern-most cabin because that is closer to Greenland …. For traveling to Colorado or other points west, this book is going in the car, of course.