Book Description
Drawing from the collection of the world-renowned Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Bird Songs presents the most notable North American birds including the rediscovered Ivory-billed Woodpecker in a stunning new format. Renowned bird biologist Les Beletsky provides a succinct description of each of the 250 birds profiled, with an emphasis on their distinctive songs. Lavish full-color illustrations accompany each account, while a sleek, built-in digital audio player holds 250 corresponding songs and calls. In his foreword, North American bird expert and distinguished natural historian Jon L. Dunn shares insights gained from a lifetime of passionate study. Complete with the most up-to-date and scientifically accurate information, Bird Songs is the first book to capture the enchantment of these beautiful birds in words, pictures, and song. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, located in Ithaca, New York, is a nonprofit institution focused on birds and whose mission is to interpret and conserve the earth's biological diversity through research. The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab is the major source of sound recordings of birds for research, education, conservation, the media, and commercial products.
Listen here
Trumpeter Swan
Laughing Gull
Eastern Bluebird
Customer Reviews:
perfect book for young and old.......2007-10-17
I bought this for my wife and my grand daughter. They love it and the sounds authentic and the book is easy to use.
Reading level: Ages 9-12 - I don't think so!?!.......2007-10-01
Great book for my coffee table for people to press the bird numbers. My favorite is the Northern Mockingbird, and my cats never fail to perk up their ears at it.
I've seen birds in my back yard react to different bird songs I played, so I can imagine that a lighter weight book would be great to take on field trips for attracting certain birds.
Some of the owls are eerie sounding, but I love owls (they eat mice, right?), so I play them often. There are others I haven't even heard of, not being a birder. But I'm handling the learning curve, and it's certainly fun!
Great for beginning birders.......2007-09-27
This is now our favorite coffee table book-- although we have to tear it out of the hands of guests in order to have conversation about something else. The sound is excellent. Gave a copy to my sister who also loves it.
Great book.......2007-09-27
Great book. The pictures and writeups for each bird are good and the sound is pretty good. I wish there were even more calls included for each bird. Great gift for any bird lover.
Cool Book!.......2007-09-26
It is true, the birds will respond if you play the songs outdoors-It caught the attention of many of the woodpeckers In my backyard..I know the birds by sight but needed help with the songs and calls and this is perfect! Great Idea for a book and a must for beginning birdwatchers or just birdlovers....
Amazon.com
Serious birders delight in autumn as migrating flocks provide the opportunity to observe the species that aren't normally around to observe. They don weather-proof shoes and layers of clothing, grab binoculars and All the Birds of North America, and head for the marshes before the football fans arise from their pre-game slumbers. With a weather-resistant coating, and an index that includes little boxes for ticking off the species that you see, the American Bird Conservancy's Field Guide has an easy-to-use format of icons (aerialists and shorebirds, fly-catching bills and straight bills) that allows you to zero in on type before dealing with the details that differentiate between Boreal, Carolina, and chestnut-backed chickadees.
Book Description
A surer, faster, easier way to identify birds
Everything you need to know about North American birds is at your fingertips in this ground-breaking field guide--the first and only guide to successfully organize birds by field-recognizable, instantly-observable characteristics.
With its unique keying system based on how and where birds collect food, spectacular panoramic color illustrations, weather-resistant pocket-size format, emphasis on conservation, and endorsement by the leading bird preservation organization, All the Birds is the single most useful identification guide available.
How to use All the Birds of North America
Step #1: Open to the key for Waterbirds on the inside front cover or to the key for Landbirds on the inside back cover.
Step #2: Select the icon that most resembles the bird being identified, and note the color bar and key number next to that icon. Using the color bar and key number, locate the group of birds within the pages of the book.
Customer Reviews:
Not as good as Sibley's, but... lighter!!.......2007-08-03
This is an excellent "field replacement" for Sibley's guide to the birds of North America, which is in my opinion the very best available. As anyone who own Sibley knows, though, it's a big, heavy guide, not so great if you want it with you while hiking or biking. For such occasions, I usually have "All the birds of North America" with me. It is comprehensive, the illustrations are done by different artists are mostly well done (but mostly not as beautiful as those in Sibley) and useful. You will find a map for each bird, on the same page as the illustration, so the guide is very easy to use. The cover is made of a soft, very resilient plastic material, which is excellent for a field guide. Overall, I find the combination Sibley-All the birds perfect, and I never felt the need to buy a third field guide.
Terrible.......2007-03-05
Quite possibly the worst book I've ever used in terms of organization. The color coding is done with these vaguely differing colors which are only differentiated in the best of light, the numbers shown on the inside of back and front covers are never explained, and there are quirky things such as why do they list "Swimmers" twice without an explanation -- if I'm trying to identify a swimming bird why not group them together? And a Table of Contents to at least get you to the right section would have been a nice touch. Don't buy it.
Good for your bookshelf.......2007-01-22
This guide has excellent illustrations , text, and number of species (plenty of accidentals and several plates on Asian vagrants to the Aleutians).
However it has a huge drawback and that is organization. No quick index at the back or front of the book, no color-coding, but the worst part is it doesn't follow the orthodox order of birds, going in taxonomic order.
I would buy it for my desktop or bookshelf, but not as my "primary" guide.
Nice for beginners.......2003-08-26
This book is a very useable field guide for beginning birders. The book is organized to help you identify birds as quickly as possible. First, you decide whether you are looking at a water bird or a land bird; the first part of the book covers water birds, and the second part land birds. If you're looking at a land bird, you next decide whether you've got a large bird or a small one. The section on large birds has small silhouettes of the birds' shapes in the margin, while the section on small birds shows the birds' beaks. By flipping through these small drawings in the margins, you can easily narrow down the bird you are looking at to a few pages. Then you look at the numerous color illustrations, the range maps, the short descriptions, and the song patterns to help you determine the identity of your bird. For further information, each chapter starts with a short article that describes the morphology and behavior of the group of birds that are covered in the chapter. Scientific names are included for each bird, and rare or endangered birds are highlighted.
As a rank beginner bird watcher, I found the book extremely easy to use and informative. The color illustrations, because they are idealizations, were much more accurate and easier to use than the color photographs that appear in some other field guides. The descriptions of each bird are rather short, leaving me hungry for more details, but this book is a great place to start.
most informative and easy to use.......2003-06-05
This is the best bird guide I have ever used. It helps my family to identify birds by key features. My sons now look at birds and tell me their beak shape, what they most likely eat, the color of the legs and their relative size, all from regularly using this book. It gives pictorial examples of birds one might confuse with one another. Also useful are the estimates of particular bird population in each geographic area, with terms such as "abundant," "populous," "numerous," and "numerous but declining." I appreciate the brief, not preachy, explanations given for why certain populations of birds are declining.
Book Description
"The Birder's Bible" for more than 60 years, Roger Tory Peterson's classic Field Guide to Western Birds includes all species found in North America west of the 100th meridian and north of Mexico. Featuring the unique Peterson Identification System, Western Birds contains 165 full-color paintings that show more than 1,000 birds from 700 species. Summer and winter ranges, breeding grounds, and other special range data are shown on easy-to-read range maps.
Customer Reviews:
Field Guide To Western Birds.......2007-09-27
The book is excellent in most respect. But like all of these types it doesn't provide much help in actually identifying a bird. You can't go from "small-brown-stripes on side-purple head-green feet-S. Az area to Pages xxx & xxx for the types.
This is the book for people who like birds but didn't major in biology.......2007-08-24
So we have this pond in our backyard and it's attracted alot of birds. My husband and I have no idea what species they are or what they eat since we work in the judicial system not for the Forest Service. The solution seems pretty simple...go to Amazon and buy a bird book. So, after reviewing several options; many of which seem to require at least a Master's level education in biology and years of field experience in identification, I wildly and in some what a desperate state picked this book. What a relief when it arrives and lo and behold it is written in English with lots of pictures! We use this book at least 3-4 times per week. It is very user friendly and a great resource for the average person who wants to know what to call the yellow bird eating all the sunflower seeds...besides greedy.
Excellent for both beginers and pros.......2007-06-11
I really appreciate the drawings in this book. They are much more helpful than pictures. Also the habits are helpful when trying to identify a particular species when there are similar ones in your area.
A Field Guide to Western Birds: A Complete New Guide to Field Marks of All Species Found In North America West of the 100th Meri.......2007-05-19
This is an excellent book if you are a bird watcher. My husband received a copy of this book as a gift a couple of years ago and has since worn it out,that was the purpose of purchasing a new copy.
Western Birds.......2007-05-13
As someone new to birdwatching I needed to find some good field guides at several points on my recent World Cruise and I bought Peterson's Western Birds to use for my visit to San Francisco. I found this a very impressive book, considering the fact that it covers 700 species in such a small book. The illustrations are excellent and arrows show clearly the distinguishing points to look for with closely related species. They include summer and winter variations, juvenile plumages and birds in flight.
It is not a full field guide and does not give details of habitat but it has all the essentials for identification. It is slightly irritating to have the maps in a separate section at the end but this must aid the concise nature of the book.
All in all I would recommend it as a handy pocket guide to take in the field, supplemented by an alternative source of fuller details. Even the hardbacked version is fairly portable. Excellent value for money.
Average customer rating:
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Birds of North America: Western Region : A Quick Identification Guide for All Bird-Watchers (Macmillan Field Guides)
John L. Bull , and
Edith Bull
Manufacturer: Macmillan General Reference
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Nonfiction
| Birds
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| Children's Books
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Birds
| Field Guides
| Outdoors & Nature
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General
| Birdwatching
| Outdoors & Nature
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Reference
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Ornithology
| Zoology
| Biological Sciences
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Look Inside Outdoors & Nature Books
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ASIN: 0020625804 |
Amazon.com
Roger Tory Peterson, one of America's pre-eminent artist-naturalists and arguably the inventor of the field guide, made people love birds like no one since John James Audubon. A Field Guide to the Birds, first published in 1934, remains his most famous and wonderful work. The manual stood instantly apart from the dichotomous keys zoologists used to identify species, since Peterson grouped paintings of related species together and used arrows to, as he explained, "pinpoint the key field marks." This way, watchers could spot birds from a distance and avoid, as he archly put it, "the bird-in-hand characters that the early collectors relied on." Birders could use the guide where they needed it most--outdoors--on living birds flitting quickly by. In addition to detailed illustrations, Peterson offers charming (and useful) descriptions of each avian citizen's appearance, behavior, voice, and range. There is also priceless anecdotal information, based on decades of field experience, as in this description of the common house sparrow (Passer domesticus): "Familiar to everyone. Sooty city birds often bear little resemblance to clean country males with the black throat, white cheeks, chestnut nape." His transliterations of song are just as quietly marvelous. For instance, Pluvialis squatarola, or the black-bellied plover, makes things clear with "a plaintive slurred whistle, tlee-oo-eee or whee-er-ee (middle note lower)."
Peterson's original handbook covered birds of Eastern North America, and has since been followed by guides to Western birds, animal tracks, butterflies, and many other natural wonders. He and his team updated "The Birders' Bible" as new species were discovered and classifications modified. Generations of enthusiastic watchers owe Peterson a debt of gratitude for making ornithology accessible. But equally important, he showed scientists that finding beauty in living animals, and not just cataloging the measurements of dead ones, was crucial. Roger Tory Peterson died in 1996. He will be remembered as a passionate naturalist, a keen observer of living things, and a gifted artist and teacher. --Therese Littleton
Book Description
Explore the Expanding Peterson Line
Leave your reading glasses behind
Now Roger Tory Peterson's classic Field Guide to Eastern Birds has been reissued in a larger format specially produced for those who don't want to take their reading glasses into the field. Peterson's treasured illustrations have been reproduced in beautiful color. Species descriptions include only the most important identification elements -- size, voice, and habitat -- in large, easy-to-read type. Color range maps, have been updated specifically for this book.
Roger Tory Peterson's original text has been revised and updated by Virginia Peterson, who worked closely with her husband and created the maps for the fourth edition of the Field Guide to Eastern Birds; Noble Proctor, a professor of biology who was a close friend of Roger Tory Peterson's and led natural history tours for twenty-five years; and Pete Dunne, vice president of the New Jersey Audubon Society and director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, as well as the author of many books on birding. The maps have been updated by Virginia Peterson and Paul Lehman, past editor of Birding magazine and a bird tour leader who has traveled extensively around North America studying bird distribution and identification and has written many articles on these subjects.
Customer Reviews:
Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Bird, Large Format Edition.......2007-07-27
This easy on the eyes large format edition is a great book for all ages and levels of bird watching. The soft cover makes it light to handle or take with you in the field. The large format makes identifying birds much easier and quicker. Well layed out and practical.
Peterson Field Guides.......2007-03-16
It took almost 3 weeks to get this item. Very disappointed in comparison to other items I've ordered through Amazon.
Not your father's Peterson Guide.......2007-01-13
I mistakenly thought that the large print version would be the same as my trusted old Peterson Guide, just in large print. Nope! The format is entirely different and greatly abbreviated. It's misleading to title this text the same as the original. This may be a nice guide for a novice bird watcher for bird feeder identification. I gave my copy away to a shut-in with minimal bird identifying experience.
Misrepresentation .......2006-06-25
This book was bundled with another bird book, and the offer appeared directly under the Peterson Field Guide book, which I thought I was ordering. It was not very obvious in the small thumbnail image and description that it was a child's coloring book. I did not get what I wanted and have since returned it.
Perfect book for the older birder.......2006-01-30
I purchased this book for my mother, who is in her 70s. She recently started birding so this was her first field guide-easy to read, large pictures make identification very easy for the beginning birder of any age.
Book Description
All the day-flying birds of prey seen in North America. Peterson FlashGuides are the most compact and convenient field guides ever made: slim as road maps and ideal for hikers, bikers, canoeists, or anyone who wants to travel light.
Customer Reviews:
A quick easy to use identification guide.......2000-07-01
This Flashguide delivers exactly what you would expect. The information found first hand is the most important details needed to identify hawks. Raptors in flight are hard to identify and the guide permits to see the major differences between species. I would recommand it to anyone starting in birding or having difficulties identifying these beautiful birds. Also, the format is practical in the field.
Book Description
How to create and maintain an environment that attracts, shelters, and nourishes birds.
Profiles 75 popular birds.
Customer Reviews:
Backyard birding beginner.......2002-04-28
My husband and I just recently became interested in the beautiful birds in our backyard. We purchased this book and we find it is very helpful in identifying our visitors. Although it isn't packed with detail on each bird, the information provided is very useful. It also tells you how to build birdhouses for specific species of birds. We recommend this book to anyone who is beginning to bird watch. We also like that the pictures of each bird are actual photos and not drawings. It made a big difference in identifying some of our birds.
Books:
- Birding by Ear: Eastern and Central North America (Peterson Field Guides(R))
- Birds of Michigan Field Guide, Second Edition
- Braids And Self-distributivity (Progress in Mathematics)
- Catesby's Birds of Colonial America (Fred W Morrison Series in Southern Studies)
- Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
- Conflict After the Cold War, Updated Edition (2nd Edition)
- Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial (Oxford Science Publications)
- Design for Six Sigma : A Roadmap for Product Development
- Design for Six Sigma : A Roadmap for Product Development
- Differential Equations, Dynamical Systems, and an Introduction to Chaos (Pure and Applied Mathematics (Academic Press), 60.)
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