The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America | David Allen Sibley, Rick Cech

The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America | David Allen Sibley, Rick Cech | bird guide

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The Sibley Field G...

	The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America David Allen Sibley, Rick Cech Knopf, 2003 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 60 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good companion to Western Edition

I bird in the NW US using the Western edition of this book. I bought the Eastern edition for a trip to Florida because I was used to how the Western edition was organized and didn't want to miss any birds while I learned a new system. Have used it on subsequent trips to Georgia and Louisiana. It's an excellent companion book to my own book, 40 Excuses to Get Together with the Girls if you're working on Excuse #10 (Because I want to know that bird's name).

bird guide

I already own a lot of bird guide books, and I wondered if this would be of any value. Surprise! I found myself using it quite often to distinguish between look-alike species. For a book with such small pages, I found the pictures to be of decent quality. It is a very nice little ID book for a reasonable price.

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Best Bird Guide I've found

I'm no expert bird watcher, but I've taken an interest in the natural life that visits my own backyard. I borrowed a number of bird books from the local library, and Sibley's Guide is the most comprehensive. It is also the easiest to use, containing many illustrations of all the bird species. Birds are grouped together by families, which gives you a helpful starting place so long as you know if the bird is a water fowl, a raptor or a songbird, etc. Each description covers nesting and feeding habits, and there are handy maps that show the geographical range for each subspecies. The portable guide contains all the information and illustrations from the full-size volume, and it's much better for taking along on hikes.

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Bird Watching 101!!

I belong to the Cornell Orinthology Bird Watching. I love to watch the birds from the 8-10 feeders in my yard. My girlfriend is also an avid bird watcher, and recommended this book to me. I have found it VERY resourceful in identifying birds and tidbits of information about them. I take this book with me when I travel, so I can identify birds in other parts of the U.S. The only downfall is the way some birds are listed in the index-you sometimes have to look under various names to find the type of bird you're looking for.

Has Flaws

How is it possible that the red-tailed hawk and the red-shouldered hawk, seemingly numerous and very common, be categorized as "uncommon" by Sibley? The answer--nearly every raptor in this book Sibley categorized as "uncommon" except for a rare "rare" such as the gyrfalcon. Both vultures get the "common" label and that's it. When the American Kestrel and the Osprey are "uncommon", but so too are the far less seen white-tailed kite, swallow-tailed kite, peregrine falcon and caracara, then even having this category in the book becomes questionable.

What Sibley should have done is saved space by not even categorizing with his useless "abundance ranking" and used that space for more identification info. Example: In the section on terns, Sibley states if a tern's feeding habits include plunge-diving or not, but incredibly, never even mentions it with others, for example, the Forster's tern. Also, does this tern hover, and if so, how does its hover style compare to a similar tern? Don't know as Sibley ignores that and instead wastes space by saying the Forster's tern has a black eye patch, which need not be mentioned since his illustration very nicely shows that mark, even including a note and line drawn toward it stating "black eye patch".

In the field guide for birds genre, Sibley's book may outshine some others, but it does so with erratic and incomplete narrative and a useless abundance ranking. The book gets the job done mostly through its excellent illustrations that makes this book a useful field guide one could recommend.

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