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Title: National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: East : Revised edition by NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY ISBN: 0-679-42852-6 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 27 September, 1994 Format: Turtleback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (12 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Great potential but bad design
Comment: Field guides are great to have because they're small and their entire aim is to help you immediately identify a bird you see before you. Every birder should have at least one field guide, and maybe even several - some to keep in the car or by a window.
Being published by the National Audubon Society, you'd expect this field guide to be top-notch, one developed and tested by thousands of birders. Indeed, the photos are very nice, full color and in 'native habitat'. The descriptions are pretty complete - with size, key things to look for, song, hapitat. There's a little map showing range, and the range is also described as well.
The problem is with the layout. All of the pictures are at the front of the book - put into groups by bird type, three to a page. Often there's only one photo of a bird, even though they look different during different years of life or seasons. If you see something that seems it might be right, now you have to go flipping through many pages to track down the actual *information* on that bird. Does it even live where you're looking? Are there other similar birds it might be instead? What are those key features you're supposed to be watching for? By the time you figure any of this out, the bird is probably back in hiding.
It seems with their knowledge of birders and how birders operate, they'd have arranged this book in an easier-to-use fashion. While this is a nice book to have for its lovely pictures, it's not what I grab when I need to bring a field book with me on a trip.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not as good as the Peterson Bird Guides
Comment: This National Audubon Society field guide to birds has lots and lots of nice, but small, photos of birds. That's nice. This guide also includes most of the birds of the region. Those are the plusses of this book. There are, however, a number of minuses that come along with this book.
First of all, no photograph-based field guide can show the important characteristics needed to identify most birds as clearly as a good illustration can. Next, the only info that accompanies each photograph is the common name of the bird, along with its gender, average size, and a reference to a page number to a section in the back of the book that provides all of the descriptive narrative information for each species. That info includes each bird's physical description, voice (call), habitat, nesting info, and geographic range (with a map by the info -- that's nice). The part that's frustrating for me is that I have to spend time flipping back and forth between the photo section at the front of the book and the info section at the back of the book in order to get the info I'm looking for! While I'm in the field birding, that's a hassle! I therefore much prefer the illustrated format that has pictures and descriptive info of the Peterson Guides to the Audubon guides.
Still, the Audubon guides are useful, though I use mine primarily as a secondary source, and it usually stays inside when I go out -- Peterson is my guide of choice.
I am, by the way, a novice birder myself, and find that the Peterson Guides help me to ID birds faster and with fewer errors than the Audubon guides do.
5 points for photos, but 3 points for ease of use, for 4 points overall.
Good luck,and happy spotting!
Alan Holyoak, Dept of Biology, Manchester College, IN
Rating: 4
Summary: An Excellent Field Guide for Birders
Comment: This is an excellent guide to identifying birds. The National Audubon Society is an excellent authority on all things nature, and therefore it is not surprising that the National Audubon Society would publish a helpful guide. The guide helps a birder identify birds by behavior, size, habitat, plumage, call, and location. There are color photographs of many birds to guide the birder. The plates are grouped by family which makes basic identification easy. The book also has a section that describes each bird as well as maps that show the likely locations where birds can be found. The color plates are enjoyable simply to look at, and can help a person prepare for possible sightings. The book is small enough that it can be carried to the field. The cover is also durable so it can withstand wear and tear. Since the boos are divided buy Eastern Region and Western Region, so the book is not very cumbersome.
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Title: National Audubon Society Field Guide to Trees: Eastern Region : Eastern by NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY ISBN: 0394507606 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 12 May, 1980 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: National Audubon Society Field Guide To North American Wildflowers : Eastern Region: Revised Edition by NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY ISBN: 0375402322 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 03 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mammals : (Revised and Expanded) by NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY ISBN: 0679446311 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 21 May, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders by NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY ISBN: 0394507630 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 12 November, 1980 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians by NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY ISBN: 0394508246 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 12 November, 1979 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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