Q: Which well-known birder has just produced a book of Frequently Asked Birding Questions (FABQ)?

A: Blogger, writer, radio personality, Science Editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and well-known font of birding knowledge Laura Erickson.

To quote from ‘Introducing “The Bird Watching Answer Book” (’TBWAB’) page on ‘Round Robin’, Cornell’s bird blog, “One of the most-visited pages at All About Birds is our Frequently Asked Questions page…birds are an unending source of questions for the people who watch them. We’ve calculated that the Cornell Lab staff answers some 80,000 questions per year from the public.”

80,000? That’s around 200 questions a day! And Mike, Corey, and I sometimes find it hard to keep up with the - er, twenty or so questions a month we get sent into our 10,000 Birds Clinic…

Of course Laura doesn’t answer all those questions herself, but she presumably does get to see and hear about many of them, and she has obviously noticed that a good number of the same questions keep getting asked over and over again.

Just because a question becomes an FABQ doesn’t mean that it’s any less valid or not worth answering of course - “How do owls fly so silently?” (page 352) is always worth knowing the answer to. Long-time birders will probably know why we’re often ‘paranoid about cats’ (page 99) but hopefully birding is continually recruiting new members who are seeing things with fresh eyes and asking questions us more experienced types may not have thought about for a long, long time: eg “Do all birds sleep in nests?” - page 250, “Why is bird poop white?” - page 297, “How many feathers do birds have?” - page 331, or how it is that birds can sit on electrical wires and not get zapped, which is answered on page 95.

In fact skim through this delightful book and I’m willing to bet that even birders who are pretty long in the tooth will quite often be stopped short by one of the seemingly never-ending stream of queries this book answers. “How many [bird] species mate for life?” for example: hmm, I have no idea actually, and though the answer supplied isn’t an actual figure the long response (which spreads over three pages) is very interesting and answers several questions that arise from the original one for good measure.

As might be expected from a book produced by Cornell and written by Laura Erickson (photo below) “The Bird Watching Answer Book” is far more than just a simple Q and A compendium. Something like the size and shape of a thick field notebook ‘TBWAB’ is almost 400 pages long, is very well-written (as anyone who knows Laura’s writings won’t need to be told), the FABQs are very sensibly arranged in twelve chapters making them very easy to find (there is a comprehensive index too), and one Q and A leads straight into another on the same or a very similar subject: the tendency is just to keep reading and learning.

While the emphasis in publicity for this book is on the Q and As, potential buyers (of which there must be thousands and thousands) should be made happily aware that for the bargain-price of $14.95 they will be getting far more.

Subtitled “Everything you need to know to enjoy Birds in your Backyard and Beyond”, the scope of ‘TBWAB’ is far wider than just Q and As. There are snippets of interesting information contained within dark blue boxes, and blog-length articles (or mini-essays) are scattered throughout on blue-toned pages. On top of that there are numerous accurate pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate a good number of the questions (there are no photographs, but this is not intended to be a field-guide and using photographs would have sent the production costs - and therefore the retail price - of ‘TBWAB’ rocketing).

The whole package is therefore much larger and far more comprehensive than it might first appear.

As a UK-based reader I ought to point out that the bird species that the book refers to are predominantly North American. There are many mentions of juncos, House Finches, and chickadees, and the ‘robin’ Laura frequently answers questions about is the American Robin Turdus migratorius. If that puts off buyers from this side of the Atlantic that would be a shame though as the advice given is (as far as I can tell) never so specific that it’s not useful in other parts of the world too. I certainly didn’t feel alienated in any way, and the broader questions about migration, physiology, and bird behaviour are relevant wherever you live.

It’s perhaps also worth mentioning that not unexpectedly ‘TBWAB’ does not try to tackle controversial subjects like evolution vs creation, human over-population, or the bird trade, or go into lengthy discussions about (naive and poorly thought-out) programmes like the Trap-Neuter-Release schemes that threaten to further slash urban bird populations by artificially boosting feral cat numbers. I don’t suppose that many people would expect a collection of frequently-asked questions to do so though (that’s what 10,000 Birds is for folks!), but Laura is well-known for her conservation work and though this is not specifically a ‘conservation book’ she does discuss pesticides, extinctions, climate change, and some conservation strategies - so buyers looking for something extra alongside the whys and wherefores of bird feeders and how to stop herons pinching koi carp from garden ponds shouldn’t be disappointed.

I’ve had “The Bird Watching Answer Book” at home for about a week now, and I would guess that I’m using it in exactly the way Cornell intended: I keep it handy and I occasionally skim through it either because I’d like a good read or I’d like to find out more about a specific subject. At almost 400 pages I’m sure I can keep doing that for many months without necessarily re-reading the same page. I’m fairly sure that anyone buying ‘TBWAB’ would find themselves in the same happy position.

Would I recommend this book then? Most definitely. It’s fun, it’s informative, it’s useful, it’s very good value, and the very welcome conservation and welfare message about ‘taking care of birds’ pervades every page - and perhaps Mike, Corey, and I could shut down the Clinic if everyone bought a copy, because, you know, those twenty questions a month we’re answering are really stretching us to the limit…!

# Paperback: 400 pages
# Publisher: Storey Publishing LLC (2 Dec 2009)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 1603424520
# ISBN-13: 978-1603424523
# Product Dimensions: 16 x 11.9 x 2.8 cm