Stokes Field Guide to Birds, Eastern Region (1996)
Stokes Field Guide to Birds, Western Region (1996)
By Donald and Lillian Stokes
Little, Brown and Company, $17 each
These are arguably the most user-friendly guides and the best photographic ones, highly recommended for beginners. The Stokes's, who have hosted a PBS series on birding and authored various nature books, cover eastern and western birds in separate volumes, each rather bulky — slightly larger than the National Geographic Guide, which covers all of North America.
Photos, text, and tiny range maps are on the same page. For each species, the authors devote a paragraph to identification (with distinguishing characters in boldface), feeding, nesting, other behavior, habitat, voice, and conservation. The conservation paragraph gives population trends based on data collected by participants in Christmas and breeding bird counts. Species that come to feeders or use birdhouses are denoted by symbols placed at the top of a page.
Treating one bird per page leaves plenty of space for photos. For some species, a single large photo of a typical specimen suffices; for other species, multiple photos may show adults, immatures, seasonal plumages, color morphs, and flight profiles. The tradeoff in the one-bird/one-page approach: readers must turn pages to make comparisons between species.
The front of the book has a quick guide to the birds most commonly found around the house. Interspersed throughout are"learning pages" that help beginners sort through the more challenging groups: flycatchers, gulls, hawks, shorebirds, sparrows, and warblers.
The authors' two-pronged solution to the "flipping through" problem is simple yet effective. An alphabetical list inside the front and back covers directs you to the page that has the type of bird in question. Or, you can refer to the pages facing the inside covers, where color-coded tabs take you to one of 23 major bird groups.
