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Here are the bird book reviews published in the last month or so that I’m aware of.

Several good bird books have been published lately, of which here are a few. I’m planning to do full reviews for all of these, but thought I’d go ahead and present some brief thoughts (especially since I don’t write nearly as fast as I wish I did).

• The Private Lives of Birds: A Scientist Reveals the Intricacies of Avian Social Life
  Bridget Stutchbury

  This book provides birders a glimpse into the ornithologist’s world. The author investigates the habits of birds in regard to mating, parenting, territoriality, migration, and more. But she does more than just present the facts; she explains the studies that were done to discover those facts. This is a great introduction to the lives of birds. Even experienced birders will learn something new.

• Peterson Reference Guide to Molt in North American Birds
  Steve N.G. Howell

  Molt is an intimidating topic, but one that is important for birders to understand. Howell first gives an extensive introduction to molt, and then describes the molting patterns for each family of North American birds. Honestly, I was surprised to find that all of the family accounts were worth reading; you never know what fascinating tidbits you may uncover, like the possibility that Bullock’s X Baltimore Oriole hybrids are selected against because they could be molting twice in the fall instead of just once. Personally, I understand molt much better now, and can see myself referring back to this guide often. Highly recommended to intermediate-to-advanced birders.

• Birds of Cape May
  Kevin T. Karlson

  Essentially a large-format photo album, this book showcases the birds of Cape May, New Jersey season by season. Karlson, an excellent photographer, provides most of the photos along with short captions. Recommended to those who’d like a good souvenir or reminder of a trip to this birding hotspot, or to any fan of bird photography in general.

• Nightjars, Potoos, Frogmouths, Oilbird, and Owlet-nightjars of the World
  Nigel Cleere

  This large, lavish book is a photographic guide to an intriguing group of birds. Just the fact that this book includes photos of every known member of this nocturnal and secretive group is amazing enough (though some, by necessity, are of museum specimens), but they’re also of very high quality and huge! Most birds are shown perched or roosting, there are few in-flight shots, unfortunately. A range map and terse text covering the species’ identification and natural history round out each account. This certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but caprimulgid fans should love it.

• Birds of the West Indies (Princeton Illustrated Checklists)
  Norman Arlott

  The guides in this “illustrated checklists” series are more than merely bound checklists with illustrations, yet less than a full field-guide. Still, a good bit of information is included in this portable book. With painted plates on the right-hand pages and text on the left, the design is certainly typical for field guides. It does include range maps, but unfortunately, they are all gathered together in the back. I haven’t yet extensively compared this to the identically named field guide by Herbert Raffaele. From my cursory examinations, I can’t unilaterally recommend one over the other right now.

• Birds of Australia: Eighth Edition
  Ken Simpson and Nicolas Day

  I don’t have any other Australian field guides to compare this against (except the prior edition of this guide!), nor have I ever been anywhere near Down Under. So I’m no authority here, but this is one good-looking field guide! Maybe it’s all the exotic-looking birds, but the plates (again on the right-hand page) are gorgeous. Text accounts, small black-and-white drawings, and very informative range maps accompany the paintings. For a field guide covering an avifauna about the same size as the US and Canada’s, this is a fairly compact book, making it possible to carry in the field. Take this with a grain of salt, given my lack of experience with this region, but if you’re looking for an Australian field guide, this is a legitimate choice.

Earlier today, Corey of 10,000 Birds posed some interesting questions about bird books. You should head over there and read the entire thing, but it basically boils down to: why do we birders have so many books about birds?

Besides the obvious answer that it allows crazy, obsessive types the excuse to create entire websites devoted to them, it’s a good question. Of course, you have to start with field guides. We legitimately need them for identification, and since birders tend to travel all over the place the field guides can really pile up. But even then, we aren’t satisfied with just one field guide. We need a guide that utilizes paintings as well as one that uses photographs, a larger guide that encompasses the entire continent and smaller regional guides, all-encompassing guides and family-specific ones.

But even so, field guides make up a relatively small portion of my birding library. So why have all the rest? Corey postulates two reasons, and both apply in my case. The first is that I want to learn all I can about birds. That includes how to identify them, obviously. But I also want to know about their biology and behavior. Birds are endlessly fascinating; you can read all you want but you’ll never know it all. Three of the books I’ve read recently have dealt with this, and I learned many interesting things from each one (National Geographic Bird Coloration, The Private Lives of Birds, and Molt in North American Birds).

The other reason Corey gives why birders may be such bibliophiles is that we tend to be a bit obsessive. We have lists for everything else, why not books we’ve read? This is definitely me. I’ve always been a collector. As a kid, it was Star Wars and Batman toys, baseball cards, and comic books. Now it’s bird books (as well as movie, comic, and baseball memorabilia – I don’t think I’ll ever grow up). I’ve wondered if my collector’s mentality is one of the things that attracted me to birding in the first place. Listing is, after all, just another word for collecting.

The final reason that I think I have so many bird books is that I simply enjoy reading about birds and birding, beyond reading for knowledge. I love big year-type accounts and other birding narratives. You’d think that reading about someone else birding would be the most boring thing in the world, but I devour it. I’d wager that the appeal of the numerous bird-art books is readily apparent. And then there’s anything written by Pete Dunne…you get the point.

I don’t think I ever stood a chance. My predisposition to collect, life-long love of reading, and the fact that a bird book got me into birding all conspired to make me a bird book lover. I’m glad that I’m not the only one.

Here are some bird book reviews from the last few months: