rrminardi

Seabird addiction for many of us began with Peter Harrison’s Seabirds: An Identification Guide back in the 1980s and 1990s. This niche has grown in the last 30 years with pelagic trips now available from ports all over the world! As more birders...

Consider Winged Migration, the 2001 documentary that is still available for streaming more than two decades later; A World on the Wing, Scott Weidensaul’s bestseller of two years ago; and Wingspan, the wildly fashionable board and video game. The popular appetite...

Robert Bell spent 35 years as a successful mineral exploration geologist and as such traveled widely. Eventually Lyme disease made life so challenging that he had to, with much reluctance, retire early. Unsparingly and intensely personal...

Warblers of Eastern North America by Chris Earley is a welcome second edition to Warblers of the Great Lakes Region and Eastern North America, published 20 years ago, and is one book in a whole library of field guides by Firefly Books...

Much as with birds themselves, it is not uncommon for birders to feel a sense of Zugunruhe, or migratory restlessness. Birding is, in many ways, a travel-centric hobby, and it is natural to desire to see new birds in far-flung places. I’ll never forget...

As a reader of birding media, you might ask yourself, who are the prominent women in the history of bird conservation? Rachel Carson is one name among many, our sisters in the field whose work has not yet garnered...

“The thrill of quiet adventure. The constant hope of discovery. The reminder that the world is filled with wonder.” One would be hard pressed to come up with a better description of the essence of birding than this...

First off, let me be entirely clear: I am biased. I am extremely biased. In 2005, I attended a conference in Chicago where Dr. Klem gave a presentation to architects about bird mortality caused by windows. He was the frustrated voice...

Northern Cardinals are one of the most common birds in much of the U.S. They are a frequent, maybe even daily sight for many of us. Despite the males’ bright red showy appearance and their laser-beam songs...

Wildlife biologist, photographer, and filmmaker Tim Laman’s Bird Planet is a vibrant, richly detailed, highly captivating, and in-spirational photographic voyage through eight different geographic regions: Southeast Asia, Japan, North America, Africa, South America, New Guinea, Australia, and Antarctica...

Danielle Belleny’s charisma shines through in this lighthearted read that delivers substance as a beautifully illustrated page turner. About one-quarter of This Is a Book for People Who Love Birds acclimates you to the avian world...

“Travel is inherently harmful,” he declared. It was 2017, and I was sitting in a lively graduate class in the Community Sustainability program at Michigan State when a classmate made this wild statement. The rest of us were flabbergasted. “What about our research trips?” my friend retorted. “Traveling is how...

One of the best parts of watching birds is observing their behavior. Birds are rarely boring. They fly, forage, interact with each other and with their environment, court, raise young, deal with danger, and undertake mind blowing migrations, just to name a few of the fascinating things birds do...

You’ll be celebrating more than birds when you pick up a copy of Celebrating Birds: An Interactive Field Guide Featuring Art from Wingspan, by Natalia Rojas and Ana María Martínez. This illustrated, introductory guide to North American birds is the outcome of two innovative women-led projects within two distinct industries...

I have to admit, my first impression of Richard Pope’s Flight from Grace: A Cultural History of Humans and Birds was of its size: This is a hefty, almost textbook-sized tome, not a book suited to light bedtime reading. But as I flipped through it, admiring the full-color illustrations on each page...

I have had spectacular fails birding in New Mexico. They have often resulted because I simply couldn’t find where the bird was supposed to be. The remoteness of many parts of the state, the inadequacy of various maps, and my predilection to figure out things along the way have all...

Birders love learning about the life histories of birds: fascinating migration routes, unique ecological adaptations, bizarre exceptions to standard bird biology—we can never get enough. In a similar way, ABA Area birders enjoy learning about the life histories of birders from outside the ABA Area, how the ways other birders...

When I first hefted Bird: Exploring the Winged World, all 11 square inches and six pounds of it, I deemed it a coffee table book and braced myself for the kind of tome that is gorgeously illustrated but whose covers are rarely cracked. I was wrong. Bird is many things...

Like any great story, the scene is set early in the book. Marina Richie first spots the pair of Belted Kingfishers she grows to love while im-mersing the reader in her experience at Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana. “To visualize the watershed,” she writes, “cup two hands together. Rattlesnake Creek...

Have you ever had the experience of being absorbed in observing a bird and having a stranger ask, “What are you doing?” and “What do you see?” How to answer such questions? Famed Louisiana ornithologist Van Remsen counsels birders to treat birding as a “serious pursuit”; he suggests we describe...

Compared to Christopher W. Leahy’s earlier encyclopedic tome of 917 pages, the Birdwatcher’s Companion to North American Birdlife (first published in 1982), Birdpedia is indeed a brief compendium. But don’t let its small size and number of pages fool you. This book packs an astonishing amount of information into 272...

The title of this book might not immediately grab the attention of those who don’t delve much into taxonomy, but the cover image will. Indeed, the photograph of a Zebra Waxbill represents the indisputable visual appeal that many members of the family of estrildid finches hold. It is that beauty...

The first hint for many of us that something was going on was a throwaway line in Chandler S. Robbins’s Golden Guide, “Watch for them [migrating parulids] flying within 500 feet of the treetops in early morning.” Watching, I found, was easy—but actually identifying passerines in the air posed…

If field guides had gestation periods, then the long-awaited Birds of Argentina and the South–west Atlantic’s was elephantine. Since Mark Pearman and Juan Ignacio Areta started work on it almost two decades ago, rumors of the mythical guide circled like vultures on the now quiescent Birdforum. Yet it survived...