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Birding Florida
Reviewed by Mark S. Garland

For as long as people have been birding there has been a need for information about places to bird.  The niche of the bird finding guide was first filled in a widespread, popular manner by Olin Sewall Pettingill in two volumes titled A Guide to Bird Finding East of the Mississippi, first published in 1951, and A Guide to Bird Finding West of the Mississippi, from 1953.  James A. Lane popularized the idea of regional bird finding guides, writing several such guides during the 1970s, a series eventually taken over by the American Birding Association (ABA), which continues to periodically update older volumes and publish new titles as well.

While a number of regionally published bird finding guides also exist (including Bill Boyle’s excellent book for New Jersey, the revised edition published by Rutgers in 2002), The ABA Bird Finding Guides are generally considered to be the gold standard for this genre.  Over the years the ABA has listened to criticisms and developed many design features that make these books very user-friendly.  It’s hard to go wrong with an ABA Bird Finding Guide.

In recent years, Falcon Press has moved into this genre in a big way.  Long a leading publisher of hiking guides and other volumes related to outdoor sports, Falcon is rapidly contracting with regional authors and creating an extensive set of bird finding guides.  Birding Florida, written by Brian Rapoza, is the latest effort from Falcon  Since this book covers the entire state, and Bill Pranty’s ABA guide also covers the whole state, it’s easy to make a comparison.  At first glance, the ABA guide jumps out as easier to use.  The text is larger, the maps more plentiful and more clearly drawn, the directions more concise.  The spiral binding of the ABA guide is a real plus – the Falcon book will readily flip closed when propped open on the seat of your car, while the ABA book keeps the map and directions right where you want them.

Digging through the text, I like the way the ABA guide is organized better than the Falcon Guide.  On the plus side, the Falcon Guide includes a ton of information, and includes great range maps for each species found in the state.  But each chapter includes several different birding areas within a region of Florida, and there are no sub-headers to make it immediately clear where the description of one area ends and that of another area begins.  Many key areas are highlighted by bold text, but this does little to eliminate the confusing layout of the book.  Birding Florida seems to be designed more for a birder to read before visiting an area than to use, quite literally, as a guide during travel.

It’s worth owning both books if you’re planning to bird in Florida, for each will offer a perspective and some specific information that is missing from the other.  Falcon promises to make very frequent updates to its guides, relying on the ability to economically publish these guides in small press runs.  If they follow through on this promise, that will be a great asset to their series.  But if you want just one guide to birding in Florida, I’ve got to recommend Pranty’s ABA Guide.

Rapoza, Brian.  Birding Florida.  Guilford, CT, Falcon Guides, 2007.  292 pages, $22.95 paper.  ISBN: 978-0-7627-3914-1.

To order a copy of a title reviewed on the Birder's Bookshelf, please call CMBO’s Northwood Center (609)884-2736 or the Center for Research & Education (609)861-0700.

Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America
Reviewed by Mark S. Garland

A few years ago we learned that Kenn Kaufman was working on a whole series of new field guides.  This was good news, for Kenn’s skills with both nature and with words are held in extremely high regard.  This first of the series published (in 2000) was the bird guide, no surprise given Kenn’s notoriety in birding circles.  That book met with mixed reviews, partly because of the illustrations, which were photographs that had been digitally manipulated to eliminate backgrounds and provide consistency.  Some were disappointed to discover that Kaufman directed his guide more to beginners than to experienced birders.  The book fills its niche quite well, most reviewers agreed.

While I found the bird guide to be okay, I really liked Kaufman’s butterfly and mammal field guides.  Now Kaufman and Eric R. Eaton have written the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America.  This is a great book.  Of course it’s not complete – there are WAY too many insects to include more than a tiny fraction of species in a reasonably sized field guide, especially one attempting to provide coverage for the entire continent.  Like earlier insect field guides (most notably the Peterson guide, written by Borror and White), the Kaufman guide pays great attention to the coarser taxa of order and family.  But a number of species are illustrated, and it’s uncanny how many species included are ones that I recognize from field encounters.  Clearly the authors spend a lot of time in the field, and they have included insects that are most frequently encountered.  It’s a delightful surprise to see so few illustrations that seem completely unfamiliar, and the careful selection of illustrated species makes the book extremely useful.

As with the earlier Kaufman field guides, the text of the insect book is clear and concise, with a minimum of technical jargon.  The short introductory section is also clear, concise, and very useful.  It’s a shame that field guide introductions are rarely read carefully by users, who often do nothing more than try to match up pictures with critters found in the field.  A four-page pictorial table of contents serves as a simplified key to the major groups of insects, and I think beginners would find this to be very helpful and easy to use.

Certainly it won’t take anyone much time to find species in the field that are not illustrated in this guide, but unless you find something especially peculiar, you’re likely to get your critter sorted out to the level of order quite easily.  For most of us, just getting that far is good enough.  It’s the first step toward understanding the classification system used for insects, which inevitably leads to an understanding and appreciation of the massive diversity of this class of animals, and of their many crucial roles in habitats all over the globe.  If you pay any attention at all to the natural world, you will notice insects.  If you have any curiosity at all, you’ll want to know something about them.  Let Eaton and Kaufman help you out.  The Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America should be in the library of naturalists all across the US.  I already treasure my copy.

Eaton, Eric R. and Kenn Kaufman.  Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America.  Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.  392 pages, $18.95 paper.  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-15310-7; ISBN-10: 0-618-15310-1.

To order a copy of a title reviewed on the Birder's Bookshelf, please call CMBO’s Northwood Center (609)884-2736 or the Center for Research & Education (609)861-0700.

National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America
Review by Mark S. Garland

I’ve been a fan of the National Geographic Field Guide since the first edition was published in 1983.  There were some problems with that first edition (remember the Connecticut Warbler with the huge foot?), but birders were pleased to find many corrections in the second edition, which came out in 1987 rather quickly after the first.  Somehow I’ve managed to accumulate these books – you know, out on a trip, didn’t think I’d need a field guide, buy it again at some wildlife refuge bookstore.  I think I own two copies of the first edition, three of the second and one of the third.  I managed to hold back from buying a copy of the fourth edition.

Well, I’m buying a copy of the fifth.  There are some wonderful improvements in the new book, and that’s high praise when coming from one who loves the earlier incarnations.  There are some new plates – because the National Geographic guide has always utilized multiple artists, it has always been criticized for its inconsistent artwork.  With each new edition the overall quality of the art improves.

Two very nice design changes will prove useful to many birders.  An abbreviated index has been added to both the front and back inside covers – in the front it’s an index to bird families, and in the back it’s a list of one-word bird names (warbler, bushtit, merganser, sparrow).  You’ll get to the right part of the book more quickly, and since each index appears on a fold-out page extension, you can easily mark the pages you’re using at any given time.  The guide has also added 7 thumb-tabs for major groups of birds to speed up the process of getting to the right pages.  Hawks, sandpipers, gulls, flycatchers, warblers, sparrows, and finches are marked by the tabs.

Accuracy and completeness have long been hallmarks of the National Geographic guide, and here, too, we find improvements in the new edition.  The guide has always included more rare species than most other field guides, and now the editors have added a 14-page section titled, “Accidentals, Extinct Species.”  With this section the National Geographic guide includes every species for which there is an accepted record in North America, as defined by the ABA – at least every species as of the time of publication.  Many distinctly plumaged subspecies are also included, with special emphasis given to subspecies rumored to be candidates for upcoming splits (such as Eastern vs. Western Willet).

Everything we’ve loved about the National Geographic guide is still here.  Many love its size – a bit bigger than many field guides, which allows for bigger pictures and bigger print, yet small enough to fit in many pockets.  Excellent range maps (Cape May’s own Paul Lehman continues to be the great guru of North American bird distribution, and he is listed as “Chief Map Researcher/Editor” for this book), superior text, solid introductory material … it’s simply a great field guide.

I can hear some of you thinking, “Is it better than Sibley?”  My answer: it’s different from the Sibley guide.  Every birder who is halfway serious about this pastime is going to own both, and many of us will also own Peterson, Kaufmann, and perhaps many other field guides.  But while I own them all, I rarely find myself turning to any guide other than the National Geographic or the Sibley guide.  The two are complementary in approach, and having them both makes each more valuable.

Dunn, Jon L. and Jonathan Alderfer (eds).  National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America.  Washington, National Geographic Society, 2006.  504 pages, $24.00 paper.  ISBN-10: 0-7922-5314-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-7922-5314-3.

To order a copy of a title reviewed on the Birder's Bookshelf, please call CMBO’s Northwood Center (609)884-2736 or the Center for Research & Education (609)861-0700.