You Can Never Have Too Many Bird Books

Some of my old books

These are my most used books for identification

When it comes to identifying birds, you can never have too many bird books. Well that's my opinion anyway. I probably have around 100 bird books. Most serious birders have a lot of bird books. I should point out that many of my bird books are old, close to 100 years in some cases and some of the books in my collection are just because I like the art in the books. I have favorite bird illustrators and will buy a bird book because they illustrated it.

A couple of books that have art from my favorite illustrators

But if you are only a casual birder and or a student whose teacher is forward thinking enough to include the wonders of nature in her curriculum, one really good bird book is probably all you will ever need. If I were only choosing one book from the dozens of books available currently, I would pick from one of these three.*

These three books get the most workout

1 The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America, - Most bird books using photographs are fairly poorly done, have only one picture, usually taken in bad light and strange angles. This book has excellent photos and many examples


2 The Sibley Guide to the Birds, This is probably the best done bird book by an artist due to the many different plumages, angles, flight shots, as well as immature examples. There are others that rival this book but I don't know any serious birder that does not have at least one copy of this book.


3 National Geographic's Field Guide to the Birds of North America. This book had goon through many revisions and the most recent one is very good.


There are also apps that can be purchased for smart phones and some of them are pretty good. My favorite two are Ibird, and the Audubon app. I find Ibird easier and quicker to use but the Audubon app has more information and more audio tracks. The coolest thing about the apps is the audio tracks because you can use them in the field. If you are careful not to over do it, you can play them and the birds might respond. It doesn't always work and you should not play bird tapes near active nests because this stresses the adult birds. I use the audio mostly to check my ID when I hear a bird call that I can't identify but I think I know what it is.

I make  one caution on the use of the internet to identify birds. In this google age, it is easy to get access to information and you can google images of any bird name and you will get dozens to hundreds of pictures. But here is the caution. Google searches the whole web and if the bird name is on a page it will bring that into the results. But the person who associated the bird's name with a photo may not have posted the correct photo. This happens a lot so you must realize that a net search is not the most accurate way to get the correct ID. Often people will write an article that mentions several birds but uses only one of them as an illustration. But the way google works, any bird mentioned in the article will come up with that one picture. My suggestion is you consult books first and the use the net for a way to get picture of lots of different views once you know what the bird should look like.

* My international followers most likely have a favorite bird book from their region as well. 

Welcome to Mr Sutherland's Amazing Bird Race.  The purpose of this blog is to record and report the birds I see from September 1, 2014, to August 31, 2015.  I have never heard of anyone doing a "fiscal" year bird list before, this might be the first one.  People typically keep a calender year list and see how many species they can list in one year.  I have been asked by Maurita Crew, the upper grade teacher in the Three Sisters Adventist Christian School to help her challenge her students with birds.  She is going to use Birds as the base for the curriculum for the year and build the teaching modules around the life of birds.  I will be doing what I always do every year, I will be out birding.  It is my intention to cover most of the lower 48 states at some point in the fiscal year starting at the beginning of the school year which is September 2, 2014.  My first trip will start September 3 and will include about 8,000 miles travel ending on about the last day of October. I will be covering at least 26 states and one Canadian Province. It is my goal to make this my biggest year, trying to list at least 500 species. My current big year record is 474 species.  Mind you this was a calendar year and it was 2004.  It will be interesting to see if making the year from Sept to Aug will make any difference in the ease or difficulty at which one can see bird species.  I will be posting my progress several times a month and will keep a running total of the birds I see and will post them here.  So come along with me as we see how many birds I can find in the coming twelve months.  You can also follow me on facebook.