You are browsing the archives of field guide.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ah, what a time to be a young birder in America! Not only is there an endless, free torrent of thrilling birding content online, but some of our sharpest minds have tackled the thorny task of creating a field guide strong enough for an adult, but made for a kid. Thus we have Bill Thompson [...]

I’ve spent quite a few hours lately reading and paging through my recently arrived field guide, Birds of Europe. With a planned trip to Germany in October I want to be prepared to identify everything I see and hear…which isn’t too likely but I can dream, can’t I? Having never birded outside of the U.S. [...]

The 3 Bs of birding, those items without which this activity just cannot be enjoyed fully, are Bins, Books, and Birds. That last B probably goes without saying, while the first one can be considered the least essential of the three, though still mighty important. Books, on the other hand, are almost as essential to [...]

Summer, by which I mean true summer and not just that fallow period after spring migration subsides, is finally upon us. In many parts of the world, summer means shorebirds, a prospect that inspires equal parts excitement and trepidation. This loose organization of sandpipers, phalaropes, lapwings, plovers, oystercatchers, stilts, and avocets represents a little more [...]

The first thing one notices about Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion is its intimidating bulk. This massive tome, larger even than The Sibley Guide to Birds, is not likely to accompany any but the strongest-backed birders into the field. Next is the astonishing realization that, apart from the dust jacket, this book is devoid [...]

The field guide guiding us on our January 2006 trip to the Bahamas was A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies by James Bond. This volume, written by one of the most well respected names in Caribbean aviafauna, edited by Roger Tory Peterson, and illustrated by Don R. Eckelberry, Earl L. Poole, [...]