Customer Reviews

Arizona And New Mexico Birds

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I have never left a review until today. This book is pathetic. I am Chief Park Naturalist and have birded many regions of this Country. In the past, I have actually used other Lone Pine books to help narrow regions and to create target list for species to view. However, after this book, I will never trust Lone Pine guides again. Arizona and New Mexico have a species checklist of over 560 birds. Over 100 are only in these two states. Almost none of them are in this book. Case in point is that there are 19 species of Hummingbirds in these states, but the book only discusses 1 species - Broad-tailed Hummingbird. This book actually only cover a total of 145 species period. That is only slightly more than 20% of the species in this region.
I actually complained to the publisher about this book. I must at least give the company the acknowledgement that they did e-mail me back. They tried to defend the book, calling it a beginner's guide and compared it to their compact series. But its not marketed as such; its marketed as one of their large editions. And even if considered a compact guide, it does not even stand up to the standards of a compact guide. When compared the the compact guide of my home state of New Jersey which has a species list of over 320 birds, the NJ compact guide covers over 33% of the species and is 65 pages longer.
This book is not worth the paper that it is printed on. If you buy it, you are simply wasting your money.