The advent of advanced computing and the internet has been a incalculable boon to birders everywhere. However, the one area where birdwatchers have been slow to cross the digital divide has been in the realm of species identification. We birders just haven’t had good reason to leave our field guides on the shelf. But with [...]

I’m a New Yorker.  I was born in the Hudson Valley and grew up in the Catskills, went to school in the Southern Tier, lived in Albany, our capital city, explored the Adirondacks and the North Country, repeatedly visited western New York and now live in New York City, easily the best city in the [...]

Just two weeks ago the various listserves that cover South Africa lit up with correspondents raving about a brand new regional guide covering Gauteng (the bird-rich province that contains Johannesburg and Pretoria) written by two of the area’s better-known and well-respected birders: Etienne Marais, who amongst other things runs Indicator Birding, and Faansie Peacock, who [...]

Years ago, I wrote about the glaring homogeneity in North American birding circles and by glaring, I mean all that bright white skin. The lack of diversity in the ranks of enthusiasts has long been recognized as a deficiency at best and at worst the certain death knell of our nation’s natural resources. After all, [...]

When I am having anything larger than the mailbox in my apartment building shipped to me I specify that I need to have it shipped to my job because it is a pain to walk over to the local post office and pick up a package seeing as the hours that I work tend to [...]

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a review of Sony’s (then) new Walkman NWZ-A815, a very impressive-sounding mp3 player and a worthy rival to Apple’s omnipresent iPod. I said at the time that “writing a short review for 10,000 Birds on the Walkman…might seem a bit like someone from a hi-fi magazine writing about [...]

Everyone knows who John James Audubon became: a renowned artist and naturalist whose inimitable style and spirit made him the paragon of American birding.  Many even know where he began and of the travails that tossed Jean Jacques Audubon from Haiti to France and then into the heart of a still wild America. Yet how [...]

In his review of the Rare Birds Yearbook 2008 Simon Barnes wrote (beautifully and accurately) that it was “the best of books, the worst of books. It is a book of hope, it is a book of despair; it is a book of beauty, a book of ugliness…”. I knew exactly what he meant. Full [...]

You know your interest in birds has blossomed from passing to passion when you realize that you’re even enamored of avian artifacts from their abodes to their ovums. Yet, your aviphilia need not be avid for you to enjoy Egg & Nest, an absolutely gorgeous work by Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall,  and René Corado.

This [...]

Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick was originally published in an over-sized, luxury edition but is now available in a much smaller (about 6″ by 5.5″), more affordable, twenty-dollar edition.  Despite the small size there is a ton of content in the 336 page book.  It is gorgeously illustrated with 300 well-chosen images [...]

The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts is a new biannual publication dedicated to, quite simply, birds and creative writing. The title “LBJ” suits this work well - whether referencing a Literary Bird Journal or Little Brown Job, only insiders can appreciate the recondite charms of an LBJ, whose virtues are lost to the uninitiated. [...]

Living in a house with uncaged birds is not for everyone and that goes double for those brave enough to live with corvids.  Usually ranked up there as among the smartest of birds, corvids, which include jays, crows, magpies, and ravens, are fascinating creatures that have been mythologized, persecuted, deified, and hunted throughout human history.  [...]

So you want a free copy of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, don’t you? Of course you do. The question is how you can get one. Well, thanks to our friends at Houghton Mifflin, we are giving away two copies of Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America. My question [...]

You’d think that a person’s centennial, even a posthumous one, would be easier. The long-awaited newly revised Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America is released to the avid masses almost 100 years to the day after the Great Man himself was born and yet, the world did not spin off its axis. Humankind [...]

I just watched Opposable Chums: Guts and Glory at the World Series of Birding and it was a heck of a documentary.  Some of birding’s brightest stars provide commentary and the filmmaker, Jason Kessler, manages to capture the essence, not just of the World Series of Birding, but of birding more generally, in his 65-minute [...]

As most birders will undoubtedly be aware this month is the centenary of Roger Tory Peterson’s birth. Given that RTP (I can’t bring myself to casually call such a legend ‘Roger’, and using ‘Peterson’ sounds a bit brusque and disrespectful somehow - like calling The Queen ‘Windsor’) is indisputably one of the most important naturalists [...]

One hundred years ago this month, a true giant of conservation was born. While his origins may have been modest, his accomplishments over a long, storied life became the stuff of legend, particularly among the millions of modern birders he played no small role in creating. When it comes to biographies, could there possibly be [...]

Review: “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa - A Novel”
Nicholas Drayson
The summer holidays are coming (for some of us anyway) and perhaps you’re thinking about a book to read “on the beach” or in the hammock at home? If you are - and even if you’re not - I’d like to recommend [...]

There are some absolutely gorgeous photos of birds in Scott Leslie’s Woodland Birds of North America. The book, which is billed on the cover as “A guide to observation, understanding, and conservation,” has at least two pictures of almost every one of the nearly 100 species described in it (nearly 200 pictures altogether). [...]

Rooiels and Betty’s Bay
30 May 2008
 
Getting up early after such a previously great day’s birding (Birding the Cape: the west coast) is not all that difficult - actually not difficult at all - and when my guide Brian arrived at 07:30 I was raring to go. Unfortunately so was the rain. In fact I’d been [...]