Top 3 books

G'day, I like our top three books at the moment, very nice, and I'll start the discussion off with some questions, what is your favourite bird (that you've seen/ and not necessarily) and what is your favourite bird book (that you own/ would love to own)? I'll think on it and let you know:)

I find it amusing that our highest ranked bird book is 8th.

Me, I have a picture of a trumpeter swan, down in Maryland! Probably one of my best pictures. (Got to scan it in.) Though I use pictures of a chicken, a goose and a blue jay as icons on live journal. (LJ name: gilroycullen) These are my personal pictures I took too. :>

Main book I have right now, that I tend to use for bird identification is Sibley's Birding Basics.

I don't own many bird books, but my favorite would have to be the Birds of South America Volumes 1 & 2 by Ridgely. Fantastic, comprehensive works. I have heard that there will be no further volumes in this series. That's a pity.

My favorite bird would have to be the bird imaged on this group's front-page. The Guyana Cock of the Rock. That is not my photograph, however I did get to see a leck of these guys in Guyana in 2000. That was a wonderful experience!

Favorite birds. Hmm... that's a tough one. Maybe sandhill cranes. Three of them wake me up most mornings noisily flying over our house. In a few weeks hundreds and hundreds of them will arrive from further north and start circling and honking overhead calling our local population to join them on their migration south.

Favourite bird, Bengal Eagle Owl, that I got to fly recently, never seen it wild though.

Best book - RSPB birds of britain and Europe very useful guide to the UK birds.

Collins Bird Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe has to be about the best field guide to any avifauna - a yardstick for future guides. Beyond that, there are so many bird books these days - and so many beautiful ones - that it's hard to say which might be in the top three. Two books that have given me a lot of pleasure personally - and continue to evoke happy memories from the shelves - are Birds of the High Andes and Shorebirds: An Identification Guide to the Waders of the World, though Gulls: A Guide to Identification is very close behind. Now I see a couple of dozen other well-worn volumes beckoning for attention from the shelves as well.

I haven't got around to entering my field guides yet, but my top five (may I have five, pleeease?) non-field-guide bird books would certainly be The Snow Geese by William Fiennes, The Birds of Heaven by Peter Matthiessen, The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, Graeme Gibson's Bedside Book of Birds the astoundingly marvellous Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker (based on the format of the equally marvellous Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica...). I could - and often do - sit in my favourite armchair for hours on end reading about the simple blackbird and listening to him at the same time... Birds Britannica is such a pure, unadulterated joy to dip into!
Actually I have a few more favourites, but that'll do for now!

And as for a favourite bird - blimey, that's a bit of a tall order, isn't it? I tend to be quite conservative in my bird tastes - whenever I go birding, I tend to gravitate towards the places where I'll find returning friends or reliable residents, just to see them again and again. In other words, and contrary to my book mania, I don't set out to gather as many as I can, but rather linger and revisit at my leisure.
Favourite wader/shorebird: oystercatcher (closely followed by the lapwing)
Favourite duck: shelduck
Favourite seabird: gannet
Favourite falcon: peregrine (esp. having read J.A. Baker)
Favourite visitor (to northern Germany): common crane
Bird I've been trying to spot for blooming ages: nuthatch
Birds that make me laugh: coot, quail (there's a very funny poem in German about a quail, written by F.W. Bernstein)
Absolute favourite bird at the moment: swift

By the way, has anyone read Birders by Mark Cocker? Would be interested in hearing views on the book!

Hello Citizenkelly!

> By the way, has anyone read Birders by Mark Cocker? Would be interested in hearing views on the book!

Oh yes! It's not a book I ever intended to read though. It was gift and, despite being a birder, I don't usually enjoy books about birders or by birders. However, this one must be different. I kept it in a place I'd be pretty sure not to read it, but once I began - as I remember, just to remind myself that I don't enjoy this sort of book - I could not put it down (very rare with any book for me) and ended up devouring it chapter by chapter, mostly standing around the house since I refused to actually sit down and read it properly. Perhaps the book just resonated with me. It's a sort of cultural history of birding in the UK, but what makes it readable is that it is very well told. It does have a very English perspective and most of the characters mentioned will only really be familiar to British birders. But if you happen to be one of them, then this book might just have you stumbling around the house with a smirk on your face, not to say chuckling out loud (especially if coot or quail do that!). So I guess that is an unqualified recommendation - one of those books that really surprised me. I am even wondering in retrospect - I read it quite a while back - if it might not be the sort of book that could explain to the non-birder what birding is all about.

> The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

Great! This was another book - like the above - pressed into my hand at the end of a long birding trip. I haven't read it for the same reason I didn't intend to tackle Birders. I ahve to say, the cover photo (US edition) does the book no favours. What makes it so good?

Many thanks!

I could watch Short-billed Dowitchers (in August) and Sharp-shinned hawks (in September) all day long.

As for bird books, I mentioned several in another thread. The Sibley Guide remains my favorite go-to reference.

I use two books mainly. In Kenya I use Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa by John G Williams and in South Sudan I use Birds of Africa, south of the Sahara by J C Sinclair. I find the latter especially clear and easy to use.

As far as I know there is no modern field guide dedicated only to Sudan and South Sudan. I have an original classic 1955 book, Birds of the Sudan: Their identification and distribution by Francis Oswin Cave. It is beautifully illustrated and very interesting, a real work of art, but is not very user-friendly for actually identifying birds compared to the more modern field guides.

The fish eagle is one of my favourite birds, along with the crowned crane, secretary bird and kori bustard. I'm also quite fond of the African shoebill - ugly but interesting.