Book Reviews

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 [...]

 
One could argue that birding in the western hemisphere started on Hispaniola, with the colorful birds captured by Columbus’s men as trophies of their voyage. Today, more than five centuries later, this Caribbean island and the two nations that share it, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, are the subject of renewed interest in the birding [...]

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 [...]

I came long ago to be suspicious of the encyclopedic impulse, the naive notion that knowledge could be captured and condensed in its entirety in a way that would not reduce its value. Encyclopedias of birds, birding, birdlife, whatever they are called, seem particularly susceptible to superficiality, and browsing most of them gives me what [...]

We birders like to think of ourselves as a relatively genteel lot, and most of us can curb our tongue at least in the presence of strangers and the young. But occasionally verbal self-control gives way, and in moments of extreme stress an epithet may be unleashed to the air. “Shoulda been here five minutes [...]