Customer Reviews

The Ardent Birder: On the Craft of Birdwatching

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

 

 

The hard core will find little new in this book, but intermediate birders looking to improve their skills will enjoy and profit from the short essays. The author's style is easy and pleasant, reminding me a bit of Milton White's low-key (if not low-affect!) "Listen, the Red-eyed Vireo," a work Newberry cites several times. The final section, on leading successful bird trips, is likely to be the most practically useful (perhaps even to more advanced birders), but the sections on field craft can also be read with profit by the ambitious and the befuddled. The central section's "philosophical interlude" is no less well written, but not as incisive as, say, Levine's "Lifebirds" or Alan Powers's fine "Birdtalk."
I was particularly pleased to see the American Birding Association and its publications praised and recommended.
A good book for birders on the cusp of advancement!

This book will be a future classic for birders. I read this book twice within a few days. I never do this! I started birding a few months ago and reached number 99 yesterday. Todd's book has been a great help for me.

This is a book I read and re-read. It's best that I take it on when I am alone, because otherwise I am continually pausing to interrupt whomever is nearby to read aloud a beautiful and informative sentence (or paragraph or more) on the art and craft of birdwatching. Or, perhaps worse, I push the book itself under my companion's nose so that he can chuckle or guffaw at one of Gene Holtan's apt illustrations.

"The Ardent Birder" is NOT a field guide. Please let me repeat: this book is NOT a field guide. If you are looking for a book that will help you identify particular birds, this isn't it.

But if you would like to learn about the habits, proclivities, and thinking -- philosophical and concrete -- of a lifelong birder, I do not think you will find a better book than this. Todd Newberry writes from a position of deep knowledge (a professor emeritus of biology) and broad perspective. He references Ernst Gombrich as easily as he ticks through a number of books about birdsong.

Newberry delves exuberantly into the topic of birdwatching gear: binoculars and scopes, of course, as well as the less often discussed but no less important topic of monopods. He touches on camouflage. I had never considered that the laundry detergent brighteners can turn even muted outfits into the equivalent of "red alerts" for some birds.

About "trip of a lifetime" birdwatching, where birders embark on expensive expeditions to distant places in the hope of spotting exotic birds, he offers a number of thoughts. Simple as it might seem, in fact such pilgrimages are fraught with opportunities to "trip" up. Here are observations about frames of mind and about the nuts and bolts of succeeding as much as possible on such journeys.

Because we live near one of the least populous areas of the US mainland, it is too easy to cross inadvertently onto private lands. Sometimes markings are clear; sometimes they are really not, a situation complicated by maps with mistakes about back country roads. Newberry takes on the topic of trespassing. Without quite offering a script for going to property owners to ask permission to bird, he suggests courtesies birders might want to observe to make their presence at least tolerated and perhaps welcome.

I fall firmly into the category of "beginner" at birding and count myself very lucky to have come across a book so early on that deals specific tips and also the métier that lead to satisfying birding. And yet I would have no qualms whatsoever about gifting the book to longtime birders, who I suspect would find themselves nodding in agreement or occasionally snorting at a point of view elegantly expressed, but to which they would take exception. I will be giving copies of the book to friends who are mystified or even derisive about my new interest. Here's the brief, humorously and beautifully illustrated, too.

That bit about my being a beginner? His notes about spotting a bird a beginner like me deems unusual would have saved me a bit of embarrassment a few weeks ago. I'll say no more ;)

Our shelves are already running over with guides to birds and to locations. What we lacked was a guide to birding itself. This captivating and even enchanting book fills that need.

This book is the result of decades of birding by a biologist with a poet's sensibility. It's warm, witty, intelligent, and useful. The drawings are charming, and they lead you happily through each of Newberry's short subject headings. The chapter on bird walks should be required reading in bird circles.

The book is not a guide, but it's helpful in many ways guides are not. It develops a big picture about, simply, how to bird. You'll learn small, surprising facts, and think big, unexpected thoughts. I just finished reading Sibley's "Birding Basics" and I feel I learned more from "The Ardent Birder." There are no charts or graphs--but a connection with what the very first birders must have been up to, long before the advent of standardized birding guides. It's a book about looking, experiencing, and enjoying the critters in the air around us.

This one was a little boring and rambling, sort of like listening to your grandfather's stories about birding in the "old days". Pere Dunne's book is a lot better.