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Book Reviews

Birding the Civil War with Jon Dunn

Now this is cool.
Tours like this, where natural history informs human history, really are birding for grown-ups!

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Robinson, Birding for Everyone

One of the most cherished myths of our pastime is the belief that “anyone can do it,” that birding is democratically open to everyone, from plumbers to professors, from teenagers to dowagers. But look around next time you’re in the field in the US or Canada: as proudly various as your group may be, chances [...]

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The Peterson Centennial II: Two Lives

I didn’t know Roger Peterson, and the closest I can recall having come to meeting The Great Man was a damp morning in Princeton, when there were so many reporters and television cameras in the Institute Woods that we turned around in a righteous huff and went elsewhere.
Or rather: Of course I know Roger Tory [...]

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Birds of the World: Recommended English Names

I’m eager to get home and browse through the newly revised IOC Recommended English Names. This was an enormously fascinating–and fascinatingly enormous–project from the very beginning, and over the, what, two years now since the list’s appearance, I’ve found myself using it nearly every day, often in the form of the downloadable concordance of the [...]

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The Peterson Centennial I

A hundred years ago tomorrow, Roger Tory Peterson was born in Jamestown, New York. Houghton Mifflin is marking the centennial of one of its most valuable authors with the publication of a new Field Guide, fusing in one handsome, generously formatted volume the old eastern, western, and Texas guides. The new book will please [...]

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