The Birder's Handbook is the first of its kind: a portable library of fascinating information not included in your identification guide. For each of the 646 species of birds that breed in North America, The Birder's Handbook will tell you at a glance: * Where the bird nests, and which sex(es) build(s) the nest;* How many eggs the bird lays, what they look like, which patent incubates and for how long, and how the young are cared for;* Food preferences and foraging habits.You will also find information about displays and mating, wintering, conservation status, and much more. In addition, The Birder's Handbook contains some 250 short essays covering all aspects of avian natural history.

    This guide shows how to recognize hawks the way we recognize friends at a distance: by body shape, movements, and locale.

    We've heard stories of flocks of passenger pigeons once darkening the skies over North America, only to be reduced to a single bird, Martha, who perished in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914. Errol Fuller's gloriously illustrated Extinct Birds provides details of the natural history and fates of more than 80 species of birds now believed to be gone forever. In a lively, compelling style, Fuller conveys accurate scientific and historical information about the lives, times, and disappearances of bird species since 1600. Fuller's species accounts are vivid reminders of what birds, precisely, the world has already lost. The physical evidence provided by preserved specimens is given narrative texture with Fuller's use of eyewitness accounts of the lives (and, in many cases, the last days) of bird species from all over the world. Nearly all the accounts in Extinct Birds are illustrated with breathtaking color plates, many by artists, including Audubon, Keulemans, and Lear, who had the advantage of working from fresh specimens or even from living birds. These paintings, beautiful in their own right, are also primary sources of scientific knowledge. Birds for which appropriate illustrations did not already exist are shown in new paintings produced especially for this book.The revised edition of Extinct Birds includes several species among them three from North America not covered in the original 1987 edition. More happily, two species have been rediscovered in the intervening years, and several others in danger of being declared extinct have been located again. By describing in words and pictures the beauty and diversity of those birds already lost to extinction, Fuller inspires us to do what we can to prevent future editions of Extinct Birds from drawing new chapters from the field guides of today."

    It is now brought back into print, complete with the original drawings by Francis L. Jaques."As I reflect on the multitude of books published and read over the past thirty years, I can think of none to which I have returned more often and with more constant satisfaction than Louis Halle's Halle's Spring in Washington, a mixture of ornithology, international affairs, and reflections on the human scene, " wrote John W Nason in the American Scholar in 1961. "Written by a State Department official during World War II, it is an escape to the real world of nature and man. 'To snatch the passing moment and examine it for eternity is the noblest of occupations, ' writes Halle. He does so with quiet wisdom and originality. To read him is inevitably to share his passion."In the form of a journal, the book takes the reader along on excursions through Washington and its environs -- the Tidal Basin, Rock Creek Park, and beyond -- to experience the rebirth of the season. To the movement of winds and skies, the migrations of birds, the budding of plants and trees, Mr. Halle brings a quick and observant eye. But more important, he brings an imagination that can evoke in the reader a new perception of the drama in the universe around him.

    Lively, anecdotal, and authoritative, this guidebook takes the birder by the hand and leads him or her into the field showing exactly what is needed and not needed to be a better birder.

    Here Am I--Where Are You?, all about geese, is ultimately a very human book and a fitting conclusion to a brilliant thinker's career.

    Birders and bird watchers will never look at their feathered friends in quite the same way after they encounter these freakquent fliers.

    These are some of the things that catch Merrill Gilfillan’s eye and ear in this radiant collection of essays. Written with a poetic economy that often attains grandeur, Magpie Rising is an exhilarating tour of the Great Plains—its geography, wildlife, history, mythology, and food, its vast spaces and weirdly synchronous time. This is nature writing at its most evocative and insightful.

    When one of his release sites was raided by a golden eagle, he managed to save a peregrine chick, and decided to make an improbable two-thousand-mile trip with the surviving young falcon, Dolly. From the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, following the autumnal migration of waterfowl, O'Brien taught her to hunt as a wild falcon would, in the hopes of releasing her into the natural world. The Rites of Autumn is the riveting account of their incredible journey. (51/2 X 81/4, 208 pages, map)

    Lizards dart, tortoises creep, and snakes glide out of sight.The Mojave Desert is a special place. Its landscape is powerful and mesmerizing.Here is an extraordinary celebration of this vast and ever-changing wonder for readers and nature lovers of all ages.

    Size indicators, charts, an index, and more.

    It will surely be a standard work of reference for many years to come. The 47 superb colour plates form the backbone of the book, each plate being accompanied by an informative caption page summarising the criteria required to identify, and in many cases, to age and sex each species, along with colour world distribution maps and an easy-to-use cross reference system to the main body of text.

    It comprises an exciting collection of over 740 seabird photographs by more than 300 of the world's leading seabird photographers and researchers. The majority of these photographs have never been published before, and include pictures of some of the rarest and most enigmatic birds in the world--species such as the recently discovered Amsterdam Albatross, the Chinese Black-headed Gull, the Relict Gull, and the near-extinct Short-tailed Albatross. Of special value are the flight shots of some of the most difficult-to-identify groups of birds.Seabirds of the World represents easily the largest and most complete collection of seabird photographs ever published. It is complemented by a highly readable and succinct text intended to aid identification in the field.