Tell me your favorite Bird guide Book

I am new to BirdPost, I am finding it is extremely interesting. I was trained in Wildlife Biology in the late 1970’s. My mentor was Dr. Don Pattie..he was a professor in my wildlife classes. He also leads tours in the Aleutian Islands in the summer.
Has anyone here heard of Ben Bashem, I met him recently in South Texas, he is in his 80’s, and has been birding for many years. He was very interesting, he used to go out on trips with Roger Tory Peterson of Peterson’s Field Guides. I do not
have a contact for him as I lost his phone number, but know where he lives, so will go visit again sometime. He was very Big in Birding, and located nesting pairs of eskimo curlew in British Columbia, after they had been believed to be extinct.
I haven’t had time to do as much serious birding as I would like, but have traveled a lot, and always kept an interest. I have been very lucky to have had some very rare experiences in the wilderness.

I have recently purchased an iphone, and got to BirdPost through the application I found their.

I am looking for a new birding guide. Is there a good online guide?

Thanks for any help with this,
Elana

Hi Elaine,
Here`s two to have a look at:-
www.surfbirds.com
www.birdid.org/Default.asp
I have loads stored on my “favourites” but most of mine cover Western Palearctic.
Another is the “Internet Bird Collection” which is worldwide but you will have to search on Google to get the right address. Another is “Avibase-the World Bird Database”
Hope these are good for starters.
Maurice

I haven’t used any online guides. For regular book guides, I’m on the east coast of the US, and highly prefer the Eastern North America version of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds. I don’t know how different it is in format to the full US version of the Sibley guide.

What I like most is at the beginning of families, it shows a full page(s) of female or fall plumage birds. It makes it easier to narrow down your suspects, then refer to the pages with full accounts. Also, the annotated paintings taught me How to look at birds to make IDs.

On-line guides
All About Birds http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/
WhatBird http://www.whatbird.com/

Thankyou for the suggestions, I have bookmarked a couple of them. I will look for the Sibley Field Guide when I get a chance,
I liked the old peterson’s field guide I have had for many years, but it is in need of replacement, and it’s always nice to have new one’s.

I have this one bookmarked and like it very much: http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/infocenter.html

I also use the search tool at http://www.whatbird.com/ because it allows me to enter different criteria to narrow the selection.

For in the field (North America) I’m more than happy with National Geographic Fifth Edition. I like the layout a lot, as it has handy tabs to help jump to major goups (and a page reference for common types of bird in the back cover), and you don’t have to flip back and forth between plates and descriptions and the maps are right there next to the pictures. The illustrations are (mostly) very well done.

Online, I use Whatbird for North America to identify species I have a question on, and both Cornell labs and the USGS site are also helpful for confirming IDs (so is google image search for that matter, haha).

For Australia I used http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/ and found it very helpful. In the field I used the compact edition of Michael Morcombe’s guide. The layout of that book was a little awkward at first and I had trouble identifying a few birds based on its illustrations, but overall for a compact edition I found it quite useful- particularly at the beginning of each section where he gathers each species from the group for size comparison and gives a page number for the different families. Having that size comparison was indispensible!

In New Zealand I used the “Hand Guide to the Birds of New Zealand” by Robertson/Heather. There were times when I sort of wished I had the full edition (which contains more detailed species accounts, I believe), but since I was backpacking across the country size and weight were major considerations and I had to make due with the lighter-weight paperback version of the guide.