Customer Reviews

All About Tennessee Birds

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Good basic guide to the most common birds found in the state of Tennesse...isn't all inclusive though. Still a good beginning book or just all around bird guide.

At first look, this is a terrific idea (a book on just my state) and the mechanics of it implementation (binding, size, etc) are excellent for a field guide. And the general Alsop books are well respected and thorough, with good information about the birds of larger geographic regions.

However, this book is flawed: it misses too many of the birds found in TN. For example, Alsop has two wrens (House and Carolina) but does not mention the Winter wren which spends the winter here in TN. He has the Red-eyed Vireo, but misses 4 other Vireo's.

It seems the book was written to a fixed number of pages. Once they were gone, the rest of the birds of TN got left out. About seventy of the 204 pages in the book are devoted to attracting and photographing birds. These are worthy topics, but not at the expense of leaving birds out. Identifying birds is the main purpose of field guides such as this, a purpose this one poorly fulfills.

If all the birds of TN were included, this would be an excellent choice for a TN resident or visitor. The ommission are so many that I have to keep my more general and complete (and larger and bulkier) bird field guides with me, making "All About TN Birds" redundant and unnecessary.

I am a beginning "backyard" bird-watcher and this book was very informative. I was easily able to identify many species by the pictures and descriptions in the book. I really enjoyed that this book was specifically about Tennessee birds. I didn't have to go through endless pages about birds that aren't even in my region.

Would suggest to any Tennessee bird-watcher.