Birds of Eastern North America: A Photographic Guide
Paul Sterry, Brian E. Small
Princeton University Press, 2009

It’s only by working your way through Princeton University Press’ magnificent new Birds of North America page by page and bird by bird that you realize just what an impressive accomplishment it is.

You could guess the size of that accomplishment by the pedigree of the talent that produced it; Paul Sterry has written dozens of books on birds, including the texts of some mighty fine bird-guides from years past, and Brian Small is likewise experienced, the photo editor for Birding magazine and a prolific freelancer.

But even knowing these combined track records won’t fully prepare you for how eye-catching this volume is – and how handy it is. The achievement is made possible by the latest advances in digital photography and page-layout, and the philosophy is a functional revelation at which other guidebooks have usually only made cursory stabs: birds like to change their clothes.

Typical birding handbooks in the last century take a mug shot approach to their subjects. The page on bald eagles will feature a big picture of an adult male, perched majestically. The entire section of wood-warblers will feature one shot of an adult male golden-winged warbler, doing duty for everybody else. The 1990s saw a real revolution in this approach, with books like the seminal Sibley Guide giving aspiring and experienced birders indications of how the appearance of a particular bird species changes, not only between genders but between seasons and from adolescence to adulthood.

Birds of Eastern North America takes this revolution one step further: Brian Small’s digital photography is incredibly clear, and every entry displays its subject in the iterations watchers are likely to encounter (with distribution provided by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology). Since a young red-shouldered hawk looks like an entirely different bird than an adult red-shouldered hawk, this is a mighty helpful thing (and the sexual dimorphism of some species is drastically greater than this).

Whether you explore this volume while tromping through marsh and meadow or blanket-swaddled in your favorite reading nook, you’ll see these old familiar feathered friends in such a wealth of greater visual detail that you’ll have the very pleasant sensation of seeing them all for the first time. This is a guide to keep.

Tuc Macfarland

Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan … and the World

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By Courtney Humphries
Kruistocht in spijkerbroek film
Smithsonian Books, 2008

Although Courtney Humphries spends a good-sized chunk of her new book Superdove taking her readers through the arcane and more than a little dotty world of professional pigeon breeding, training, and showing (it takes real effort to make dog-show people look normal, but the pigeon-folk manage it easily), she reserves her fondest focus and her best prose – not to mention her sharpest observations – for the ordinary ubiquitous city-dwelling bird all urbanites know so well. Those same urbanites often also hate those everyday pigeons, considering them filthy or destructive or even just unsightly (New Yorkers are particularly notorious in this regard), but those uncharitable souls may find their sentiments change after reading Humphries’ festive and engaging book. Donald’s Nephews download She encourages her readers to see their kinship with the avian community:

A Plumm Summer movie download Pigeons have something else in common with those people you see every day on your way to and from work. They are commuters. An albatross’s wings are so large that flapping them for very long would exhaust it. Pigeons, on the other hand, are great flappers, and they can easily power their way through a commuter flight on a windy day. It’s a lifestyle that people, once they settled into agrarian communities, no doubt related to – and took advantage of.

The book is predictably full of anecdotes and folklore, all of it good reading. Humphries is perhaps a little excitable when it comes to some of the more picturesque science of her subject (peregrine falcons don’t, for instance, dive on their prey at 200 m.p.h., though they might wish to), but this hardly detracts from a slim volume that isn’t trying to be a scientific treatise in any case. Superdove download Bath Day Inherit the Wind move is instead a book to enjoy and share, especially with city-folk of your acquaintance – and any pigeon aficionados you might be unfortunate enough to know. 

                                                                                                                               –Steve Donoghue