Book Reviews

 
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, [...]

Mike O’Connor owns the Bird Watcher’s General Store at the Orleans rotary on Cape Cod, an institution celebrating, if I figure it right, its 25th jubilee next year (the store, I mean, not the rotary or Cape Cod). In those two and a half decades, he has answered thousands of questions; most, he writes, were easy–”the hard part [...]

Long awaited, and here at last: Steve Howell and Jon Dunn’s new Gulls appeared on my doorstep this afternoon. I had a chance to leaf through it at the ABA Convention in Lafayette last month, and will ‘post’ a review as soon as I’ve had a chance to look at the book in critical detail.

With more than 720 species, Guatemala should rank as one of the world’s major birding destinations. But for a variety of reasons, historical, political, and practical, this beautiful and welcoming country has not enjoyed the benefits that ornithotourism has so richly bestowed on some of its neighbors in central America.
An energetic series of special events [...]

Feathered rats, RoPi-dopes, pigs in space: How we birders love to hate ‘em! Even those of us who confess to a grudging admiration for such aliens as European Starlings and House Sparrows have nothing but scorn for the Rock Pigeon, a filthy beast that, in its nearly worldwide introduced range, has never made the break [...]