White: Good Birders Don’t Wear White

 

Quick! Name the most influential figure in North American birding today. Score ten points if your nominee is among the half-a-hundred contributors to this book (eleven if you pointed to me: aw shucks). And score a perfect 100 if you recognized the correct answer in that last name on the little volume’s cover, Lisa White, director of guidebooks at Houghton Mifflin.

It is to Lisa as editor that we owe some of the best and most exciting bird books of these last years, many of which I have reviewed here. Her editorial skill and her canny judgment of what natural-history hobbyists need and read have given us such excellent guides as Fiona Reid’s new Peterson Mammals, Howell and Dunn’s exhaustive Gulls, and O’Brien et al.’s spectacular Shorebird Guide. Each of those titles, and the many others that, to our great profit, have crossed her desk, is innovative in a different way, speaking eloquently of Lisa’s (and Houghton Mifflin’s) dedication to providing birders at all levels with the resources we need to more fully enjoy our hobby.

The present book is less exalted in purpose, but it will find a welcoming audience in beginning birders nonetheless. In fifty “light and fun original essays,” a number of the best-known birders in North America (eleven more points if you’re sorry I wasn’t included in the canon) offer their observations and tips to make birding easier and more rewarding. Though Pete Dunne’s gracious and entertaining “Foreword” may exaggerate a bit in calling this “the greatest compilation of birding know-how of all time,” the book still provides some good advice on attacting, finding, and identifying birds.

A couple of the essays here are a bit vague, or a little smug, or just on the wrong side of self-serving (I’ll let you figure out which are which), but most are truly lapidary, little jewels of knowledge and observation. Among my several favorites: Ted Floyd’s beautiful and beautifully written “Go Birding at Night,” Clay Sutton’s historically provocative “Bigger is Not Better,” and Donald Kroodsma’s touching “Go Beyond Identifying.” In my usual vanity, I don’t often pick up a book like this expecting to really learn that much, but Dave Jasper’s “Surrender” introduced me to a technique for attracting seabirds I’d never heard of and can’t wait to try out next time I run across a flock of eiders in Tucson.

Amusingly illustrated by Robert Braunfield (who is also the author of one of the essays), this book will make an excellent gift to the beginning birders in your life. But be sure to read it first yourself.