Birds Books

But beware. This is not just a useful guide for the Southwest. Most of the birds of the Chihuahuan Desert (the largest desert in North America, covering from parts of TX, NM and AZ to Central Mexico) are depicted in this guide.
I would go as far as to say that this guía is the best Spahish guide for North Central Mexico. I live in Torreon (SW Coahuila) and this is much better for this part of the country than Peterson's Aves de México.

Kenn Kaufman has done it again, taking bird guides and birding to new heights by creating a field guide for Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States and abroad. For English speaking birders, having the names of all the birds in Spanish is a great resource, but translations of the introductory material on birding, bird plumage topography, identification, and conservation are also invaluable. Opening this book is like seeing the birds of North America again for the very first time, as I learn to differentiate the Cuitlacoche de Pico Curvo from the Cuitlacoche de Pico Corto. Can you tell the difference between machos y hembras? Have you ever seen a Gorrión Arlequín? Any English birder with even a smidgen of Spanish should get a copy and enjoy their familiar birds in this new cultural world.

Now that Kaufman and translator Fischer have done the hard work of bringing this book to press, the birding community needs to step up and get the book into the hands of people who can most benefit from it. If demographics is destiny, the growing U.S. Spanish-speaking audience for this book will only make this book grow in importance as our Hispanic population expands in size and distribution across the U.S. Thanks to Kaufman and Fischer, the language barrier has been broken. Now it remains for the rest of us to help break down the cultural barriers separating birders and observadores de aves. As we learn to give nombres to our familiar birds, hopefully we can share them with our new amigos de las aves.

Kenn Kaufman, along with Patricia Manzano Fischer, have produced an outstanding field guide of North American birds in Spanish. It is a translation of the English field guide, and gives all the names of the birds in Spanish along with the scientific name (as well as the English name in parentheses.) I believe this book will allow many Spanish speaking birders to more fully enjoy birding in the U.S. and Canada, and especially here in the Southwest. This new edition will also help break the language barrier between English and Spanish speaking birders, and should be an important overall enhancement to birders since it is the first of a kind.
Los nombres en Español de las aves son nombres mexicanos. Por ejemplo, en Chile se usa el nombre Jote de Cabeza Colorada (Turkey Vulture) y en este libro se usa Zopilote Aura. Estoy totalmente de acuerdo con esto, porque la guía es para norteamérica!
It is interesting to see the bird calls and songs in Spanish. I do wish that the Pibí Mayor (Greater Pewee) could still whistle Jo-sé Mar-í-a in Spanish instead of uwirí y ti, pi,puríu......but this vocalization makes sense too.
This is a must have book for birders who want to expand their birding horizons. Thanks again, Kenn!

Low's index has long been the bible for dealers and collectors of Audubon's Birds of America. Painstakingly accurate in its original edition, this new, updated and expanded version is produced with all the care of true booklovers. Elegant and useful. Thanks to Reese and Heald for making this invaluable tome available.

Susanne Low conducted years of painstaking research to write this lovely book. She examined four complete 435-print sets of Audubon's double elephant folio and this detailed, comprehensive Guide is the result. Every variant of every print is described including the birds depicted, the exact size of the plate mark, and where and when Audubon painted the original. A similar section describes the 150 Bien edition chromolithographs that were made in 1858-1860. The information presented is invaluable to antique dealers and collectors because it enables even the casual user to authenticate prints.

I especially like her cross-references and cross-indexes that make it easy to compare the double elephant folio prints with the Biens and the Octavos. She even included a biographical section that describes all the people who helped Audubon along the way. Writing my own book - Audubon Art Prints - would not have been possible without using Susanne's book as a reference.

This book represents a revision and extension of Ms. Low's earlier work, An Index and Guide to Audubon's Birds of America (Abbeville, 1988). It is a valuable reference for anyone interested in Audubon's folio bird prints. If you have a choice, select this more recent version than the out-of-print Abbeville edition. As in her earlier book, Ms. Low includes sizes of the plate marks for Havell Edition prints, and adds more information on the variants she encountered in a systematic review of four complete Havell Edition sets. The book also includes a wonderful bonus -- a detailed description of the Bien Edition (sometimes called the second folio edition of The Birds of America). Ms. Low's treatment is by far the most comprehensive information available in one place on this important and neglected work. As an Audubon dealer, and someone who has prepared web-based study guides of all the major Audubon editions, I have found endless uses for this book. It is a must-have reference for all serious students and collectors of Audubon's art.

This book is one of the best Grey books I have read. Ms. Moustaki does well in being simple, frank, yet detailed enough to guide the reader in how to care properly for an African Grey. Specifics would have been good in the housing your african grey chapter, but she painted a broad enough stroke and gave enough guidelines to guide the owner in their decision. This is a basic book, and meant for new-owners. It fits its purpose well!

This book has great information especially for the new bird owner. I would highly recommend reading it to anyone who is even just thinking of getting an African Grey! It gives alot of insight into things a first time bird owner might not think about ahead of time.

This book tell us all necessary information about what we want to know about african grey parrots

This is the best one-volume book on the market at this time. It has very good illustrations and good species accounts that include excellent range maps. It is the only book of one volume that covers all the birds of the Indian subcontinent with this quality of illustration. The range maps are very good and there is an adequate amount of information about each bird. It's too heavy to take into the field on your trip to India, but it is an excellent reference.

Simply the best available guide to the birds of the Indian Subcontinent. Subcontinental birders have long awaited a comphrehensive guide to the birds of this region.

No other guide comes close in quality of drawings, text and range maps. Though too large and heavy to be called a field guide. It is still brought on trips to be reviewed after a day in the field.

We eagerly await the publication of this book as a true 'field guide'- that will be useable in the field.

Ali and Ripley's masterwork cannot be touched in terms of the completeness of individual descriptions, but this volume is amazing in that it draws together all the subcontinent's spp. into one book. Even so, the tome is too heavy to carry to the field. The taxonomy is updated, as is the species list. The colour illustrations are of a very high quality; my quibble is that the individual species are too small to be very useful. The maps are miniscule and that limits their utility; the use of two colours would have helped under the circumstances. Otherwise, this book is a long-awaited treasure.

This is a great book for the bird fanatic going on a trip to West Africa. I recently took a 3 weeks' trip birding on my own in Ghana, hitting all the most famous bird spots, and thanks to this book, managed to tick 94 Lifers. Unless you are fortunate enough to get a dedicated Birder Guide, most of the game guides, required accompaniment on walks in all of Ghana's parks and reserves, will not know all that much about bird species. I was able to ID most of my birds with the plates alone, but one or two were defined by the excellent behavioural hints in the text descriptions (e.g. they perfectly described the song flight of the Zitting Cisticola, which I observed every day while in Accra, while the bird itself was difficult to distinguish from the other cisticolas, the one time I got a good look at it perching on a reed). While I still had several "????" birds (who doesn't get those?) and I probably missed a lot more without a professional bird guide, this book enabled me to understand the avian world of West Africa while birding on my own. Yes, it is a heavy tome, but as a painter I was able to sketch birds in the field on a tiny notepad and then look them up in the tome after returning to my lodging. You can take the Princeton paperback "checklist" along as well if you must have a field reference, but don't leave this big book behind! Highly recommended.

This book has to be an enormous improvement over the "old" guide to the birds of west Africa. In October & November of 2001 I used just the plates of this guide while in west Africa. They are fantastic. There are many views of each species, they are all in color, the citations are quite comprehensive and all plates are grouped together. This is the only book you will need in Western Africa - and I havn't even seen the text! But while using just the plates I was able to identify nearly every bird that I saw in one nation in the region.

This new guide is a "must" for all those interested in African birds. For a field guide, however, it is just a considerable bit too heavy. But if previous guides (Kenya and Northern Tanzania, Indian Subcontinent) are any indication, we may expect a smaller version in due time. Meanwhile, let's just enjoy what has come out. The quality of the color plates varies considerably, but they all range from fairly good to excellent. They are all by the same artist which supposedly ought to guarantee for greater consistency. In this case, it certainly is not so. There are plates that are flat, others come to life vividly; there are plates with lots of blank space whereas others (especially the raptors) are crammed. However, all the plates are most useful, often giving flight pictures for different plumages as well. Overall, color renditions seem to be good, as well. But the Plain Swift on plate 63 should be lighter colored than the Common Swift, whereas it is depicted darker. This is, however just nitpicking when compared with all the faults and deplorable plates found in recent field guides for South America. Thus, once again, birders going to Africa can be envied for another excellent guide they now have available. The text has French names as well (including an index), a good feature in an region that is partly French speaking. The excellent range maps would be more helpful if they would be opposite the plates, but their inclusion in the text allowed for more details. In addition, the caption with the plates already gives a rough indication of the range.

Useful Field guide with plenty of information on where to watch birds in NZ. Illustrations of the birds I know are good except the Common Mynah. Nice size for walking/touring holidays. Will rereview after visit to NZ in November.

Great book. There are excellent pictures and useful information. Information on where you are likely to find the birds...Fun to read while planning a trip.

I had no experience with ornithology or bird-watching and I wanted to learn. I bought every NZ bird book in the store. This is the one I found most usefull, with its detailed descriptions and detailed images. The binding is robust enough to survive being carried in my pack since 2002.

It was my bad luck to discover this book only after visiting Manhattan, but the fact that it was still an interesting read says a lot. Organized by neighborhoods, the flavor of each one is vividly and fairly described. Many interesting historical facts are thrown in, yet none intrude on the presentation of New York City as it is today. A nice surprise was a subtle sense of the author's kindness (yes, in New York!)throughout. While no guidebook can cover everything, this one will surely help anyone get the most out of their visit in a city that's too big and too interesting to waste any time in.

This excellent handbook is arranged by neighborhoods, allowing you to find all the places of interest in your immediate area without flipping back and forth. In addition, for the person that was looking for a particular type of food/etc. (that could be anywhere in the city), the author includes an appendix which has restaurants (listed according to cuisine), accommodations (listed by price), museums (by type), shopping (by type of item). The restaurant descriptions were concise and extremely accurate and included the average entree price (as a dollar amount rather than a range). The author also tells what the establishment is famous for (if anything) and the type of crowd it draws.

In addition to clever organization and attention to detail, this guide is filled with many humorous and intriguing histories of numerous places that I've actually been but until now didn't have any idea about. For example, in a sidebar entitled "Only in New York" the author refers to the gorgeous 23-acre Riverbank State Park built on top of a sewage treatment plant.

After looking at every guide in a large bookstore (for over an hour), I decided to purchase 3 guides each with a different strength. After 'reading' them more carefully it became clear that The New York City Handbook is without a doubt the most useful and most interesting. One guide had a stronger coverage in specialist shops the other guide had more information, but it was much less readable and not totally necessary. My suggestion is if you must buy only one guide, buy this one.

From Times Square to Central Park, this fun to read guide to the Big Apple is full of indepth information to guide readers through its wonderland. It puts the "new" back in "New York."

Hawk Mountain is my favorite place in the entire world, and when I received my copy of this book, I immediately started reading. I couldn't put it down. The narrative is spellbinding; among his other many talents, Broun was an excellent writer. The photographs add an extra dimension to the story of the sanctuary and make the manuscript come alive. It was especially meaningful to me as someone who is so familiar with and fond of the place, but even someone who has never seen it can't fail to be moved by the passion and the conviction with which the sanctuary founders moved forward with their vision. Highly recommended.

A true conservation classic. Anyone who has visited Hawk Mountain will appreciate this book. The wholesale slaughter of the 20's and 30's of hawks passing over the Pennsylvania mountain is vividly described and will outrage any nature lover. Broun also poetically describes the beauty and solitude of life on the mountain in all seasons. Highly recommended! Stephen Rees. Abington, Pa.

A true conservation classic. Anyone who has visited Hawk Mountain will appreciate this book. The wholesale slaughter of the 20's and 30's of hawks passing over the Pennsylvania mountain is vividly described and will outrage any nature lover. Broun also poetically describes the beauty and solitude of life on the mountain in all seasons. Highly recommended! Stephen Rees. Abington, Pa.

[[ASIN:1592289282 A Healthy Horse the Natural Way: A Horse Owner's Guide to Using Herbs, Massage, Homeopathy, and Other NaTURAL THERAPIES.

FANTASTIC BOOK, THE BEST I HAVE READ ON NATURAL THERAPIES FOR HORSES AS IT COVERS SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS ALL IN ONE BOOK

This is a great well written book. I love the chapter on massage with the pictures and great explanations on How-To. The intoductions to every chapter are great as are all the contents in the chapter. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to go "The Natural Way"!!

Plenty of books cover horse health - but how many focus on natural treatments and options for preventing illness? Any who want to go the herbal route for the horse will welcome a book which covers not just herbs but massage, aromatherapy, vibrational healing and more. Chapters link common horse conditions to effective natural healing choices and expand greatly on the options a horse owner can choose for optimum horse health.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

A beautiful book: the colors sing. This is joyful, breathtaking, work from one of the world's true artists, of any period. A wonderful gift.

This is simply one of the most beautiful books ever published (on any subject)!!! Hiroshige has collected some of the most attractive Japanese color prints ever created, replete with Japanese poetry and translations. I literally could not put this book down -- I also gasped in awe several times. Braziller has done a wonderful job -- the book is coffee table sized and is bound with quality and workmanship. This is a class act in all regards. Some might balk at the price tag, but believe me it is well worth it!

... coupled with a large format and excellent translations, makes this the single most important volume for lovers of Hiroshige, and especially for those fond of his kacho-ga (birds and flowers). This is not just another art book. You won't understand until you see it. And you must see it.