For the Birds – Gift Recommendations

The holiday gift season is upon us. Several people have asked me for gift recommendations for birders. I thought I might share some suggestions in today’s column.

All birders need a field guide and my favorite is the Sibley Guide to Birds. This guide covers all the birds recorded in North America and multiple illustrations are provided for most species. A downside of the Sibley Guide is its size, far too large to fit in a coat pocket for easy carrying in the field. To make a more portable guide, the Sibley Guide has been reconfigured into two smaller, pocket-size guides. One is for birds of eastern North America and one for the western part of our continent. The portable guides do not have all of the illustrations or text of the large Sibley Guide.

The Sibley Guides are not the only field guides to North American birds and I recommend that birders own several different field guides. Each will have information that others lack. The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America has just been published in its fifth edition. This guide covers all the birds of North America but is much more smaller and portable than the original Sibley Guide.

People on your gift list who are just beginning to get into birding might appreciate a copy of the Peterson Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America. Roger Tory Peterson’s arrow system, in which critical field marks are indicated on his excellent illustrations, is helpful for beginning to intermediate birders.

Peterson, who passed away in 1996, was one of the most influential figures in bird identification in the 20th century. From 1984 until his death, he wrote a bird column in the Bird Watcher’s Digest. The best of those essays have been collected in a book called All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures. The essays are great fun to read and the book is a real bargain.
Bernd Heinrich’s Ravens in Winter is a scientific detective story. Heinrich, a retired biology professor at the University of Vermont, owns a large tract of property in Maine near Mount Blue State Park where he has done much research over the years. The mystery concerns a Common Raven that discovered a moose carcass. Ravens depend on carcasses for much of their nutrition during the winter and this moose was a veritable bonanza. But instead of taking advantage of the food, the raven flew widely over the woods, calling vigorously. The raven was announcing the find to other ravens. The party was on! Heinrich could not understand why the original discoverer would be willing to share. Why was this raven an altruist? Wouldn’t it be better for the discoverer to keep the location of the carcass secret?

Ravens in Winter is a recounting of the blind alleys and fruitful avenues that Heinrich took to ultimately solve the mystery. The book is a fine recounting of the way that science is conducted.

Ravens are considered some of the most intelligent birds. In a subsequent book, Mind of the Raven, Heinrich explores the behavior of Common Ravens in Maine and beyond. He recounts many of his own experiments and observations, supplemented by summaries of the work of other raven researchers. The reader comes away with great appreciation for the intelligence of the “wolf-bird”.

For people who want an authoritative treatment of the field of ornithology, Ornithology by Frank Gill and Handbook of Bird Biology, written by a number of ornithologists at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, will fit the bill. The Handbook comes with a CD of bird vocalizations, discussed in the book.

I have four recommendations for DVD’s. Each is beautifully filmed and heart-warming in its own way. March of the Penguins describes the incredibly arduous reproduction of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. The film clearly depicts the remarkable adaptations these penguins have to allow them to survive and reproduce in the deep Antarctic cold.

Winged Migration is a visual delight with a minimum of narration. Using ultralight aircraft, the videographers filmed cranes, geese and other birds in flight. Footage comes from a number of locations, from Antarctica to New York City to equatorial South America.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a documentary of the relationship between Mark Bittner, a homeless musician in San Francisco, and a flock of released parrots. You will come to know many of the parrots. It is a love story in more ways than one.

Finally, consider giving David Attenborough’s Life of Birds DVD collection to a birding friend or family member. This set has ten hours of superb footage of all aspects of the biology of birds. Don’t miss the footage of the Superb Lyrebird that mimics a camera shutter and a chain saw!

[Originally published on December 1, 2007]