Rich Stallcup

A beautiful book. Excellently photos and illustrations. Great tips on bird field marks as well as differentiating one species from another. Each bird gets a whole page of pictures and info; large pages of approximately 11"x6".
Helpfully organized by (most common) habitat: Urban Areas, Woodlands, Grasslands, Wetlands, Seashores, and Deserts.
The Family Groups section could use an overhaul (more easy to read layout, more photographs), but other than that, it's an excellent addition for your home birding library.… (plus d'informations)

This is a good guide written by four experts in the birding world. My favorite part of the book is called Understanding Birds and covers topics like birds both real and imaginary, the origins of birds, life cycles, etc. The last half of the book is an identification guide and the photography is beautiful. This part of the guide is organized by type of habitat: deserts, urban areas, grasslands, etc.

Too big to be a field guide but full of useful information, especially to anyone new to the hobby of birding, this guide is enjoyable arm chair reading.… (plus d'informations)

I picked this up at the Bear Valley Visitor Center after half a day of photography at the start of what turned out to be a 4k-picture photo-vacation. It has a good number of real pictures of local wildlife with identifications; not the detail you'd find in a Sibley's guide, but I find these more useful in terms of "oh, I was *there* and saw something that looked exactly like *that* so it really was a Surf Scoter." More areas could use books of "the critters that the locals all know already" :-)

It's also not limited to birds, though that's certainly the main emphasis - it includes pictures of plenty of "things you'll probably also notice" like lizards, butterflies, dragonflies, Elk, and bobcats.

The book was entirely worth it for me simply in letting me identify most of the animals I got pictures of that day; when I go back, I'll actually use it to *plan* my sightseeing instead of just going "Huh, there's a big green area on gmaps on the other side of the golden gate bridge, maybe I'll drive up there and follow the signs". The book includes detail of conservation and naturalist activities you can participate in, and URLs for *current* information about them (no reason to assume the mist-net bird-banding project is still at the same time of day 4 years after publication, after all.)

If you're a visitor to the San Francisco area, *definitely* take a day and go see Point Reyes, and *absolutely* use this book as a reference when you do.… (plus d'informations)