How to Know the Birds: The Art and Adventure of Birding

by Ted Floyd

Hardcover, 2019

Call number

598.072 F

Collection

Publication

National Geographic (2019), 304 pages

Description

Become a better birder with brief portraits of 200 top North American birds. This friendly, relatable book is a celebration of the art, science, and delights of bird-watching. How to Know the Birds introduces a new, holistic approach to bird-watching, by noting how behaviors, settings, and seasonal cycles connect with shape, song, color, gender, age distinctions, and other features traditionally used to identify species. With short essays on 200 observable species, expert author Ted Floyd guides us through a year of becoming a better birder, each species representing another useful lesson: from explaining scientific nomenclature to noting how plumage changes with age, from chronicling migration patterns to noting hatchling habits. Dozens of endearing pencil sketches accompany Floyd's charming prose, making this book a unique blend of narrative and field guide. A pleasure for birders of all ages, this witty book promises solid lessons for the beginner and smiles of recognition for the seasoned nature lover.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member BooksCooksLooks
This is a delightful book to keep by your side for a quick read when you have 5 or 10 minutes here or there. To me, it wasn’t the kind of book you sat down and read from cover to cover. It is comprised of a series of essays taken from Birding Magazine.

This is not a bird identification book, it
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offers insights into bird behaviors and into the birding world. The reader will learn about migration patterns, how bird classifications work, why birds came to be named what they are named; I was fascinated to learn that the pileated woodpecker got his name from a Latin word that means felt hat.

There are many more interesting tidbits to learn about our avian friends in this handy book. It’s the kind of book you keep by the bed to read a few essays before you go to sleep. As it has no plot there is nothing to keep you from stopping after an essay finishing and you end on a learning note.
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LibraryThing member bookchickdi
Although the beautiful cover of Birding magazine editor Ted Floyd's How to Know the Birds may lead you to believe that this will be your typical book about birds, you would be wrong.

Many bird books are field guides, with page after page of color photos or drawings of birds, along with short
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descriptions of what the bird look like and where you find them. Floyd's book is different. He begins by describing the history of birding, referencing the seminal books in the field. It was a quiet, gentle, often solitary study by people with sketchpads, pencils, binoculars and notebooks.

Then he takes us into the present, where birding has evolved like most things- people use their smartphones to take photos to upload to numerous Facebook pages devoted to birding. There are apps to help birders organize and connect with other birders. It is much more immediate and social.

Floyd introduces us to 200 bird species, each one getting a page but not necessarily a drawing. (There are a small number of beautiful pencil drawings by N. John Schmitt that accompany some of the text.)

The contents are divided into six sections, organized by the calendar year, beginning with Spark Bird, which covers January-February. He discusses the birds you will likely find during those months in North America, gives the common name for the bird, such as American Robin, then its scientific name Turdus migratorius, which always capitalizes the first letter of the first name and the second name always begins with a smaller case letter.

He gives you a short description of the bird, and interesting fact about the bird that is the title of the page. For the essay titled He Says, She Says, we learn about the Great Horned Owl and the difference between the sounds the male and female makes. In The Upside of Human-Modified Landscapes, he talks about the Canada Goose and how these geese have evolved to "flourish in human-dominated landscapes" living near high-rise office buildings, on golf courses and wreaking havoc near airports.

Floyd sprinkles in pop culture references, talking about the movie On Golden Pond in the essay about the Common Loon, or comparing a Star Trek TV series scene to a large nest which holds a tiny Bushtit. He of course mentions the Jack Black/Steve Martin movie The Big Year, perhaps the only movie about birding ever made.

The book ends with a helpful checklist of all the birds described by species.

How to Know the Birds is really written for the person who enjoys birding as a serious hobby more than for a person looking to get into birding. It would make a wonderful gift for your favorite birder, maybe in an Easter basket.
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LibraryThing member JulieStielstra
As editor of Birding magazine, the official publication of the American Birding Association, Ted Floyd could have no better cred to author a book like this. The title is deliberately chosen: both to honor Roger Tory Peterson's classic guide, and to indicate that this is not your standard field
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guide. While each one-page chapter is hooked onto a single example species, it only does so to illustrate the brief topic he addresses, rather than describing the bird itself in much detail. Instead, this book intends to teach the reader what birding (we birders prefer this term to birdwatching) is about, how to do it, how and what to learn to fully engage in it.

Arranged in a calendar year fashion, each section covers various bird-related issues prominent during that season (sort of): the first section, "Spark Bird!" describes unique characteristics of selected species - how do you know a robin is a robin? What do you look for? What can mess you up? (Plenty! Seasonal, geographical, sexual, age-related, and individual variation, for a start.) "After the Spark" gets into more difficult identifications, learning songs, migration patterns, as appropriate in the spring. On through the year, topics like nesting, territories, chick development, fall migration, etc. are covered. Throughout, Floyd guides you to multiple sources of learning: field guides, phone apps, online resources for songs and calls, record and list-keeping, etc.

Herein lies the problem. Floyd's incredible wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm for sharing it means he has way TMI. Compressing it all into 200 one-page "lessons" is just too much to ask. The book also doesn't seem to quite know who it wants its audience to be, so it throws it all out there and hopes it will stick where needed. I consider myself an intermediate-level birder: I know a Dowitcher from a Yellowlegs, I'm pretty good with sparrows, have to look up swallows every spring to remember who's who, and my life list (the only one I keep) is about 300. (I do NOT do gulls!) So some of the information was basic for me, but would be very helpful for someone whose interest has just been piqued by a "spark bird." But Lesson 25 seems to be too much AND too soon to tackle "status and distribution, the calculus of a species' occurrence within a given range." I boggled at the breakdown of subspecies groups of Catharus [Hermit Thrushes]. When he got to molting patterns (eclipse, nuptial, prebasic, alternate...) and spectrograms for song identification, I was way out of my depth - and with only a page or two to cover it, didn't break the surface. The most fun chapters covered Things Birders Do (list, travel, chase, Big Days / Years...); how to learn to bird (alone, or with someone...); books vs electronic sources. There is arcana about bird naming and speciation according to the ABA that may thrill some listers, but not this one.

There are also curious omissions: a basic discussion of binoculars and spotting scopes might have been useful for novices looking to upgrade from the KMart bins they found in their uncle's attic; there is no discussion of guidelines for luring birds with recordings. He tends to assume that everyone plans to photograph and record birds on their cellphones, and that most people will get into elaborate listing schemes. One reason I finally dropped off the online discussion group BirdChat years ago was because it had rather devolved into more discussions of gear and lenses than birds. Chops to him for recommending "bare naked birding" (birding with just your eyes); but what he calls "patchwork" birding (birding often and intimately in a favorite single location) is glossed over rather briefly.

Perhaps the best result from reading this book might be that it will help you figure out just what kind of birder you want to be: a backyard observer, an international chaser, a serious photographer, a citizen scientist submitting data for analysis by observatories and research centers... all good! Maybe don't sit down and read this cover to cover: dip in and out to the chapters that speak to you where you are.

But the bottom line is: get out there. Find some birds. He draws a parallel with going to an art museum, which resonated with this old art history student: identify patterns, recognize individuals, and most of all, savor the aesthetics. Do you want to study every painting and drawing Rembrandt ever made? Or would you rather marvel at the van Gogh in one room and the ancient Cycladic Greek sculpture in the next? You might stumble across a Kandinsky that blows you away. Find 'em, love 'em, look 'em up, learn about 'em, and your life will be all the richer.
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Pages

304

ISBN

1426220030 / 9781426220036
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