Princeton University Press

A January day 20 years ago, Sandy Hook: We’re up to our knees in snow, shivering as we take turns admiring the juvenile Gyrfalcon through the scope. Suddenly, the brittleness of the cold air is broken by a cackling scream, and a long-tailed bird, blue and green, shoots over our heads and across the water [...]

I was quite prepared to wax enthusiastic about this new photographic guide to this assembly of nine-primaried oscines: they’re pretty birds, many of them, and the authors have already done the birding community a great favor with their works on emberizid sparrows. But it turns out, surprisingly, that there is little to recommend this new [...]

A generation ago, you could get a brawl started in just about any birder bar with one simple question: Photos or paintings?
For many of us, the answer was easy; good books, like the National Geographic Field Guide, were illustrated with paintings (of variable quality, of course), and bad books, like the disastrous National Audubon Society Field [...]

It is July, and the Arctic-breeding shorebirds have started their protracted southward migration, plunging wader-watchers throughout the northern hemisphere into the most exciting season of the year. This time around, we find ourselves in possession of several new books addressing the identification challenges posed by these beautiful and sometimes frustrating birds; and deep in the [...]