Thompson: Identifying and Feeding Birds

This charmingly written and handsomely illustrated book purports to be for the “backyard birder”–but I doubt very much that any reader will be a “backyard birder” once she’s done. Bill Thompson does a great job here of communicating many of the basic facts about attracting and identifying the birds of suburb and farm, but even better, he reveals to the uninitiated the excitement and enjoyment to be had from going further, learning more, doing more with birds.

As the title suggests, the book has two main sections, the first a guide to creating the conditions that will make your immediate environment appealing to as many birds as possible. Feeders help, of course, and Thompson offers a thorough review of the types of food and food receptacles most likely to attract birds; but the book makes the point repeatedly and clearly that nothing makes a landscape as attractive as native plants, which can create a habitat, complete with brush piles, irresistible to the most appealing of the birds we all hope to draw to our yards.

Following a useful question-and-answer chapter, the second part of the book deals in greater detail with attracting, housing, and identifying 125 of those yard visitors. The photos, many of them stretching nearly margin to gutter, are spectacularly beautiful, and almost all well chosen; some readers may wonder, though, why there is no image of a female Purple Martin, or why an eastern, heavily spotted Downy Woodpecker is compared to a western, black-winged Hairy. One of the two photos of Yellow-rumped Warbler could profitably have been an Audubon’s, rather than devoting both to Myrtle.

It’s the responsibility of a reviewer to second-guess an author, of course, and I enjoyed leafing through the 125 “common backyard birds” to see where I might have made a different choice–not necessarily better in every case, but different. I think Turkey Vulture is a bit of a stretch, particularly given the omission of Red-tailed Hawk; Merlin, included here, is much less common as a feeder visitor in most parts of the country than is American Kestrel, barely mentioned in the text. Another little raptor, Northern Shrike, is surely more common at feeders nowadays than Loggerhead–yet the latter is given full treatment and the former not mentioned.

Band-tailed Pigeon certainly belongs in this selection, but a note should have been added that it visits backyards and feeders chiefly on the coast; this is a shy bird of high-elevation wilderness in most of its interior range. A similar note could have been given for Western Scrub-Jay, a reluctant feeder visitor inland but a voracious gobbler of seed and suet in California.

Greater Roadrunners are welcome guests in many southwestern yards, but I wish the text mentioned the dangers of feeding them meat and dog food: young birds are said to require bones and skin and feathers and scales to grow properly, which their parents can harvest just fine at the thistle feeder.

There’s no reason not to mention Western Screech-Owl along with its eastern counterpart; I’ve had far better luck luring westerns to my boxes than I ever have with easterns. Speaking again as an adoptive Arizonan, I am surprised to find the uncommonish and local Golden-fronted Woodpecker given a full page and the abundant, noisy, and relatively widespread Gila Woodpecker unmentioned. Lazuli Bunting is another obvious omission, far more frequently seen at feeders and over far longer periods of the year than Painted Bunting.

Sparrows are the highlight of any winter feeder. I envy anyone who regularly has Field Sparrows visiting, and wonder how many American Tree Sparrows–a standby at feeders across the northern tier of states but not included among the choice 125–will be misidentified this coming season as Field or Chipping. It would have been instructive to describe and to illustrate more than just Slate-colored Junco; the other juncos are dismissed here as “mostly in the West,” hardly an informative comment for a birder wondering what those black-hooded, orange-backed birds are at the millet pile.

None of those small lapses is fatal; most readers will quickly move on anyway to more comprehensive field guides. And that more than anything else is the measure of the value of this book, one that is sure to inspire its readers and to help their birds.