Lang Elliott is among the best and best-known recordists of birdsong in North America. His new book, The Songs of Wild Birds, is a combination of words, images, and often spectacular sounds that will delight and intrigue birders and non-birders alike.

Elliott’s selection of 50 species reveals a distinct eastern bias (could a western volume be in the works?). The handsomely designed book presents each in a dazzling full-page portrait, most by the author, some by other well-known photographers; in a few cases, small but well-reproduced inset images allow visual comparison with similar species.

The short texts facing the photographs provide a general description of the bird’s appearance or habits and a brief analysis of one or the other of its vocalizations, accompanied by large-format sonograms (here spelled uniformly “sonagram”). The most effective and appealing of these essays are the most anecdotal, where Elliott enthusiastically describes his own experiences and impressions gathered in recording the vocalizations. Unfortunately, at least one of the essays (p. 52) appears to have been ghostwritten, and sloppily at that–or is the author really in the habit of referring to himself in the third person as “world-famous bird expert Lang Elliott”? I hope not.

A couple of the species essays also play a bit fast and a bit loose with history. Twice the author rehearses, uncritically, the canard about Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey, a story that I had thought long past the need for debunking. If memory serves, the owl that Bourke describes riding on the saddle horn of one of General Crook’s soldiers in Sonora was in fact a screech-owl; I certainly wouldn’t let the talons of a Great Horned Owl anywhere near my pommel. And Bryant did not invent the name “Bobolink,” already attested a century before the fireside poet’s reedbird spinked and spanked its way into American classrooms.

Such quibbles are quickly forgotten at the first sounds from the audio cd accompanying the book. Engagingly narrated by the author, the songs, calls, and mechanical sounds of the birds range from the beautiful to the strange. I particularly enjoyed the eery “quartet” performed by trilling Eastern Screech-Owls; the juxtaposition of eastern and western Winter Wren vocalizations is extremely informative and useful, as are the illustrations of dialect differences in White-crowned Sparrows. I’m less certain just what is to be immediately learned from the slowed-down versions of the songs of Grasshopper and Henslow’s Sparrows, but in their otherworldly strangeness these sequences are indeed eye-openers, or ear-openers, reminding us that there is often much more going on in birdsong than the merely human ear can fathom.

Who will enjoy this book? Easier to pose the question in the negative: Who wouldn’t? And the answer: No one I can think of.

Few are the birders who can write and paint with equal skill. Julie Zickefoose has long been among my favorites, and Letters from Eden, with its thoughtful prose and fine images, is certain to cement her reputation as one of North America’s best birding writers and painters.

Letters from Eden is handsomely and carefully produced, in a pleasing square format that lets many of the 140-odd images fill an entire page. In these images, a mix of finished paintings and working sketches, Zickefoose rejects the demands of field guide accuracy, preferring instead a more subjective, more artistic, and all in all more satisfying brand of birderly realism. Her style is “soft,” without any of the harsh, would-be photographic surrealism of so many illustrators nowadays; yet the artist’s intellectual honesty and visual rigor never let her work descend into Hallmark blurriness: there is sentiment here, but no sentimentality. Zickefoose draws and paints with flair and wit, and viewers of her paintings will find themselves smiling in immediate recognition of the birds and the scene they so delightfully inhabit. It is difficult to fix on a favorite, but the Evening Grosbeaks (17), plump as the apples they perch beside, are the perfect embodiments of a midwestern snowstorm; every bit as evocative, Yellow-breasted Chats (42-43) dance in front of an unseen plum thicket, and European Starlings (77) join noisy battle in the grass.

It would have been easy to let the charm of these paintings ‘carry’ the book, but Zickefoose’s prose here is far more than simply annotation, just as the pictures are more than mere “illustration.” The brief essays are grouped by season, perhaps inevitably, and most of them take as their impetus an observation or an incident on the 80 acres Zickefoose and her family live on. The casual reader will find real pleasure in dipping in to the book, opening it at random to gracefully told anecdotes about box turtles and bluebirds, starlings and bullfrogs, phoebes and copperheads. The ease of the author’s prose is as great as that of her paintings, and, as we have come to expect from Houghton Mifflin, typographical errors are trivial and scarce (page 80 offers both of the only two examples discovered on a first reading: “avia” means ‘grandmother’, not ‘bird’, and the well-meaning amateur responsible for the introduction of European Starlings to this continent spelled his name “Schieffelin,” if rightly I remember).

Pleasant as they are simply to browse through, Zickefoose’s essays deserve to be read as a body, when the serious thread that runs through them all becomes apparent. Like all good natural historians, Zickefoose describes her task as observation: things happen, she writes, “simply because I am looking, and seeing, and present”; her work, our work as birders, is the work of noticing. The phenomena of nature are made manifest unpredictably but not accidentally; gifts, she notes, come only to those who make ready to receive them. Observation, thus, gives way to action and to caring: taking sick turtles to the doctor, hanging gourds for inexplicably finicky martins, mowing around rather than over careless woodcocks.

The importance of this book, however, comes clear in Zickefoose’s meditations on what can happen when that caring, so salutary on its face, becomes the desire for control, for the ability to evoke the beautiful and to forestall the violent at will. Human efforts at control lead to a “blind corner.” “If we didn’t mow,” the author writes, “the woodcocks would have no place to stage their displays or lay their eggs. Yet our mowing [is] the single greatest threat to their reproductive success.” Zickefoose solves this dilemma easily, mowing half of her tangled field, leaving the other for the woodcocks’ nests. In other circumstances, though, the illusion of control is the source of what she calls, honestly and convincingly, horror. The innocent introduction of a voracious bullfrog into a constructed pond leads to violence no more acceptable to Zickefoose than that caused by a careless child run amok with an armful of leghold traps. Humans have a place in the world of nature, but that world exists properly apart from us, too. The “Eden” from which Zickefoose writes, like the real Eden, is a place where human muddling (take posthumous note, Eugene Schieffelin!) can too easily become presumption, with consequences we can sometimes neither abide nor understand.

Better, Zickefoose tells us, to accept that control is not always ours. Sometimes, it is up to a Brown Thrasher to run our lives. “I had let a bird tell me how to spend my Saturday, and that was fine with me.” It’s fine with us, too, if the result is a book as wonderful and as thoughtful as Letters from Eden.

Roger Tory Peterson spent the last 50 years of his life recycling.

His reputation (and his fortune) made with the brilliance of the 1947 Field Guide, Peterson seemed largely to coast after that as a writer, cobbling together books, articles, and those notorious Forewords out of material and ideas dating back in many cases to the 1920s. Read a little of any of them, and the next one and the next one and the one after that are basically the same. It’s déjà lu all over again.

Ten years after his death at the age of 87, Peterson’s project of self-plagiarism takes a new twist with this posthumous volume, a reprinting of more than 40 brief essays published between 1988 and 1996 in Bird Watcher’s Digest. The essays are preceded by a short, laudatory introduction by Bill Thompson III, which quickly rehearses Peterson’s significance to the history of North American birding.

Much of Peterson’s prose here will be familiar to anyone who started birding before 1980, and many of the passages (and even some entire essays) are immediately recognizable as verbatim borrowings from Birds over America, Wild America, and other works Peterson published half a century ago. Reading these assembled pieces one after the other, one gains a clear image of their author glancing in annoyance at the calendar and its angry deadlines, reaching to his desk drawer and his bookshelves for a chunk of prose to courier to the offices of BWD. We are even afforded a rare glimpse into the writer’s conscience in those passages where Peterson assures us that he is working hard on bigger projects, a tacit excuse for re-using decades-old material.

Most of the pleasure to be had in reading this book is in these metatextual musings, where the curtain billows to allow a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the aging Peterson behind the words he first crafted as a young man on the cutting edge of birding. The picture that emerges is as clear as it is complex. Peterson comes through as not just proud but vain, insisting with no great subtlety on his accomplishments (which were quite real); at the same time, there is a certain touching cluelessness in his overestimation of his significance as a painter. Peterson’s obsession with photography (and photographic equipment) comes through with equal clarity, and there are passages that nearly whine about having so little time to indulge what truly was his “real” hobby. In the most readable essays, we see Peterson marking the deaths of friends and colleagues; and yet, other essays are peopled by the long-dead, walking and talking through the pages as if they were still the hale and hearty companions of Peterson’s long-ago youth. Most poignant, though, are the writer’s continual references to revising his field guides: by the late 1980s, the birding world had largely passed the Peterson model by, and the appearance of “the new Western” in 1990 and the publication of the updated European guide three years later inspired the birding community to nothing more than bibliographic footnotes.

All this said, this remains an important book. Not for those of us raised on Peterson: we’ve seen it all, read it all, before, and there is no joy to be had from this volume’s all too clear confirmation that the master had run out of things to say.

But hard as it may be for the rest of us to believe, there are birders, millions of birders, whose initiation into the sport came after the death of Roger Tory Peterson, and for whom the familiar name is really nothing more than that, words once seen on the cover of a field guide they passed by on the eager way to their first Sibley. I very much hope that those birders will take up this attractively produced and handsomely illustrated volume, and that they let it be their introduction to the man who was American birding in the mid-twentieth century. If it is true that we can understand where we are only by knowing where we have come from, then a clear understanding of Roger Tory Peterson’s contributions to our hobby is a prerequisite for every thoughtful birder. This collection of essays is a fine place to start.

The author isn’t always responsible for the title that appears on his or her books, and though I don’t know for sure, I’d guess that at least the typography on the cover of this one caused its authors a moment’s discomfort. The Shorebird Guide, it’s called. The designer’s italics were probably meant as nothing more than a little visual spice; but read that title aloud, and you’ll see that it in fact issues a challenge and stakes a claim: this is not, the title seems to say, just any shorebird book.

A bold word, that italicized the. Open the book, though, and you’ll find the assertion it makes more than borne out. This is, in fact, a book so far ahead of its competition that it is likely to remain the shorebird identification resource for years to come, and no field guide of the future, whatever its focus, will go uninfluenced by the many ingenious innovations that make this volume truly essential to every birder’s bookshelf.

The success of the book is due, of course, to the expertise of its three authors, whose knowledge is surpassed only by the unobtrusive skill with which they share it. But equally important, TSG is a triumph of book design, presenting a terrific amount of information in a way that makes learning not just effortless but inevitable.

TSG is a photographic guide, but it suffers from none of the constraints that make most such works a distant second to their more traditionally illustrated competitors. Most photo guides still mimic the layout of guides using paintings, subordinating their images to the text; TSGÂ takes a completely new approach, and it is most decidedly the photos (300 pages of them!) that tell the identification story here. The captions accompanying the images are extremely concise, models of clarity and precision that point out the salient features illustrated; many captions also include a self-quiz question or two, with the answers in an appendix. Errors in the captions are virtually non-existent, and none of them more than trivial: no answer is given to quiz 163.5 (it’s not a hard one, though!), for example, and the Semipalmated Sandpiper in 164.10 is actually at the lower left; the Northern Lapwing is unidentified in 276.2, and the wing-coverts mentioned in 284.5 are in fact almost entirely invisible beneath the lower scapulars of this Red-necked Stint.

Many of these photos will startle readers expecting the portrait shots typically used in field guides. There are some very beautiful images here, but for the most part the authors have selected photos that are instructive rather than breath-taking, and that “present a more real-life image of each species, including distant birds, mixed-species flocks, and varied lighting….a much more realistic impression of each species” (23). Thus, for example, one photo shows a Spoon-billed Sandpiper with its bill nearly invisible, and another a sleeping gang of Surfbirds mixed in with other tucked rockpipers. Even badly unfocused background birds, sunset silhouettes, and birds crouched on their nests are fair game–some of them even made the subject of quizes.

Nearly every opening reveals the care with which these photographs were selected. The eleven photos of Baird’s Sandpiper, for example, not only depict the field marks of each age-class and seasonal plumage, but also just happen to show Baird’s side-by-side with each of the species it is most often confused with: Least, Semipalmated, White-rumped, and Pectoral Sandpipers. This is no coincidence, and such direct visual confrontations of confusion species will be a tremendous help to beginning shorebirders.

TSG also features more explicit comparison spreads; because, again, the photos are not subjected to the constraints of a text-based guide, these images fit seamlessly into the book’s overall design. Thus, half a dozen photos compare the “white-rumped” races of Whimbrel with the familiar North American subspecies; similar comparisons are provided for the Eastern and Western Willet (treated here as candidates for full species status) and for five subspecies of Dunlin. While variation within species is an important topic here (the Sanderling photo 142.9 is worth buying the entire book for), an entire opening is also devoted to stints, with the juveniles neatly depicted in identical poses. In the case of some particularly subtle identifications, insets of similar species are used to good effect.

The photographs are followed by 150 pages of species accounts, covering the status and distribution, taxonomy, behavior, migration, molt patterns, and voice of each of the more than 90 shorebird species included. Ranging from half a page to three times that length, these prose accounts are well written and concise, with clear emphasis on characteristics  relevant to  identification; especially welcome are the extremely detailed entries on migration range and phenology, broken down by region and by age- and sex-class where appropriate, and a fine supplement to the excellent range maps (which are, somewhat puzzlingly, placed not here but among the photos). Molt is also discussed in detail, with explicit indications of those species for which the presence or absence of active molt can be of use to identification. The voice descriptions here are thorough and evocative; a companion cd of the most frequently heard vocalizations of at least the common shorebird species would have been a very useful addition.

It should be pointed out that with the publication of the latest supplement to the AOU Check-list, the taxonomy of the tattlers and willets as presented here is out of date; Gray-tailed and Wandering Tattlers and both taxa of Willet are now included in the genus Tringa, along with the ’shanks’. The use on p. 329 of “Mongolian Plover” in reference to the northern group of Lesser Sand-Plover should probably have been explained.

This book presents a wealth of visual and verbal information, much of it quite detailed; but it is not the details that the reader is intended to take away. Both the Preface and the introductory “How to Identify Shorebirds” section of TSG announce a new, “simplified” approach to the challenges posed by wader identification, an approach based not in the first instance on the precise pattern of a bird’s scapulars or the ratio of exposed tibia to culmen, but on the first characteristics noted by the trained eye: size, structure, and behavior. This, of course, is “gestalt identification,” “jizz,” “birding by impression”; this method is how most birders come to identify most of their birds, but in a tradition that still privileges the Petersonian arrow, this approach has rarely been made the subject of a book. It is no surprise, of course, that all three of the authors of TSG have strong connections to Cape May, where this method of birding was elaborated (and the birthplace of such manifestos of jizz as Hawks in Flight and Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion). Only a Cape May birder, and a very good one, could write under a photograph showing two species of dowitcher that “the Long-billed is the big fat one”!

And it is. The simplified approach to shorebird identification works, and the photos and texts presented here will go a long ways towards teaching even the least experienced wader-watcher what to look for and how to assess what s/he sees. I suspect, however, that TSG will be even more useful to intermediate and even advanced birders, who will find in this guide a new vocabulary to help them make explicit the features they already semi-consciously use to make their identifications.

The guide concludes with a thorough glossary (the entry for “split supercilium,” apparently an afterthought, is out of alphabetical order). The bibliography, though extensive, omits mention of either of the MacMillan identification guides, both of which treat an extensive selection of difficult shorebirds; Engelmoer and Roselaar is also omitted, a surprise in a book that pays such careful attention to geographic variation. Several bird-finding guides are cited only in superseded editions.

TSG is the finest shorebird book, and one of the finest guides to any group of birds, ever published. Quality comes at a price, though, in this case the book’s heroic dimensions: the book is nearly the size of a big Sibley, and our kitchen scale shows it coming in at a bit more than 1,100 grams, the unavoidable result of photos printed on glossy paper. But shorebirding is a sedentary sport, and there is no reason not to prop this book against a lawn chair at your favorite marsh, mudflat, or sewage pond. And be prepared to be dazzled by what truly is The shorebird guide.

Not that many centuries ago, poetry was the usual mode of composition for all sorts of learned and scholarly texts. From the days of Lucretius to the end of the European Middle Ages, even natural history treatises were as likely to be written in verse as in the workaday language of prose. It’s different now, of course, and no one at the beginning of the twenty-first century would dream of producing a serious work on a scientific subject in any medium but prose–no one, that is to say, but Pete Dunne, whose Essential Field Guide Companion turns out to be the longest, the densest, and the most wonderful poem ever written about the birds of North America.

The Companion grew out of Dunne’s work on the posthumous fifth edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide. As one of the editorial team entrusted with seeing that book to press, Dunne was continually frustrated at having to sacrifice his descriptions of important behavioral characteristics to the tyranny of a page count. One of the founders of “The Cape May School,” Dunne considers behavior, expression, and attitude (the bird’s!) at least as significant as the fine details of structure and plumage stressed by the proponents of “The New Approach.” The Companion elaborates the Cape May method in individual accounts for almost 700 taxa, opening birders’ eyes and minds to a different and exciting way to watch the birds around them.

Each species or identifiable form (the fox-sparrows, for example, are given four entries) is treated in an average of two columns of densely printed text. The accounts begin, as expected, with the English and scientific names–and then all Pete breaks loose. The official nomenclature for each bird is followed by an italicized neonym, sometimes a bit forced, sometimes a bit cutesy, but usually right on the money: Buff-breasted Flycatcher, for example, becomes “Cherubic Flycatcher,” Western Bluebird “Hooded Bluebird,” Palm Warbler “The Wagtaillike Warbler.” While the last thing beginners need is another name to memorize, at their best, Dunne’s inventions capture perfectly the aspect, the appearance, or the behavioral characteristic most typical of the species in question. Some of these names are directly comprehensible, good for an immediate smile (“Pied Scythebill” for American Avocet); others make sense only when explained farther along in the text (“Ring-tailed Marlin” for Hudsonian Godwit).

The texts begin with a brief summary of status and abundance, followed by an extremely detailed account of the species’ normal distribution. The accuracy and detail of the range statements are a great strength of the Companion, and as Dunne himself notes in his generous and gracious acknowledgments, benefited greatly from the participation of Paul Lehman, who, with Jon Dunn, knows more about the distribution of North American birds than anyone living. in fact, a first reading reveals only one major error, in the breeding range of Lesser Goldfinch (a species that does not breed in or migrate out of southwest Nebraska). Vagrancy is treated rather summarily for most species, though all are assigned a “vagrancy index,” intended as a rough indication of how likely the bird is to appear outside of its normal range.

Among the book’s many welcome innovations is the brief section called “Cohabitants.” Following immediately on the clear, often extensive habitat descriptions, this section lists other birds, mammals, and other organisms typical of the sort of locality where the species can be found; my spot-checks have found these lists terrifically accurate for the species I know, and richly suggestive for those I don’t. I might point out, however, that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is more profitably sought in the company of Generalissimo Franco than of Lazarus.

The meat of any field guide (or companion) is in the descriptions; but these are unlike any descriptions you’ve ever read. Many of them are even more extravagant than the corresponding passages in Hawks in Flight, the Companion’s most obvious ancestor. Barred Owl, for example, is “big, imposing, barrel-shaped, somber-eyed,” and seems to be “wearing a shabby stain-streaked coat with a closed fur collar.” These aren’t your grandparents’ field marks, and it gets even better: “The expression ranges from haunted to really ticked off.” This is powerful, effective, evocative language, and such remarks call the bird more immediately and more vividly to mind than any number of Peterson-arrows and Sibley-captions. Dunne warns the reader on the very first page of the Companion that there are no “illustrations” in the book: he’s being disingenuous, as many of the word portraits so ably painted here are–for the birder with even a modicum of experience–a more memorable and more useful gallery than the plates of a dozen field guides. Only those beginners who have not yet compiled their mental image-stock will find themselves occasionally puzzled by these descriptions.

The wealth of witty metaphor continues into the sections labeled “Behavior” and “Flight.” The behavior entries contain both straightforward ‘facts’ (Carolina Wrens do not flock) and carefully observed minutiae expressed in the most visible possible terms: that same troglodytid is said to be “industrious but deliberate” in its actions, moving in “jerky hops” from thicket to man-made debris and back again. This section often reads like a direct transcription of the author’s field notes, its apparent immediacy engaging to the point of exciting; it is as if we were watching the bird with Dunne, who points out the tiny traits that we might have missed but that are ultimately constitutive of the typical aspect of the species before us. At their best, these behavior portraits are dead on, and call to mind precise images of birds not recently seen; if the occasional example is less successful, merely impressionistic, that may in some cases have more to do with the reader’s experience than with the author’s ability to describe his own.

The most eagerly awaited element of the species accounts in the Companion is the description of the flight habit of every species included. With big Sibley at hand, we now have images and written descriptions of the flight pattern and behavior of nearly 700 species in North America. As admirers of Hawks in Flight know, Dunne has no equal in his ability to capture in well-chosen, often surprising words the appearance of birds in flight, at any distance. There are hundreds of breathtaking examples in the Companion, and no one who writes about the flight of North American birds will ever again be able to do so without borrowing, refining, or consciously rejecting the lexicon Dunne has assembled here.

As spectacular as the “Flight” accounts are, those sections do reveal the one slight weakness in the Companion. I have spent the last week or so checking Dunne’s descriptions against my own experiences in the field, and I have found consistently that the very best of his attempts to capture flight in words pertain to birds common in the East, and the weakest are limited to species more common in the West. A similar disparity is, very occasionally, apparent in the sections headed “Vocalizations”; never exactly inaccurate, the descriptions of a few western voices seem just a little less vivid than the verbalizations given their eastern counterparts. This is hardly a complaint, but rather an encouragement to western birders to apply to “our species” and the ways we talk about them the methods and the vocabulary used by Dunne to such magical effect on eastern birds.

Impressions, metaphors, comparisons: these are the stock in trade of this strange and wonderful book. As effective and evocative as most of them are, not every one of the verbal figures here “works” for me with equal effect, and in a few cases I have found myself substituting my own adjectives, my own anthropomorphic characterizations, for those that just don’t capture the bird in the way I think it deserves. But that’s the point of this truly essential Companion: to set an example, to provide a method, to inspire birders to start thinking and talking about their birds in new ways.