Customer Reviews

The Birds of Sonora

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Make sure your expectations are set right for this valuable book. Like Monson's "Annotated Guide to the Birds of Arizona" -- this book focusses on the occurence and location of bird sightings in Sonora. Valuable for determining the frequency and location of birds in Sonora, but no details on actual sites. NOT a Lane guide to Sonora by any means. Nor does it have any photos, descriptions, etc. My interest is the 'south of the border' occurence of Arizona vagrants, casuals, etc.

This is the only recent treatment of a fascinating avifauna, an indispensable reference for all birders interested or active in Mexico and the southwestern US. A typical species account begins with a summary of the bird's abundance, distribution, and habitat preferences in Sonora; dates, observers, and citations are provided for records of rarities. Every species is given a large-scale, generally quite legible map, on which breeding, migrant, and winter occurrences are carefully distinguished.
These data constitute a clear and easily used source of baseline information for evaluating new sightings. Inevitably, in a region with a large and still relatively little-known avifauna, some of the information provided is out-of-date, with a number of species listed here as rare or even extirpated in fact still present. Careful observers will use this book in conjunction with more recent sources such as Russell's systematic treatment of the birds of extreme southeast Sonora (in: The Tropical Deciduous Forest of Alamos), the "Northern Mexico" reports in North American Birds, and the trip reports published on MexBirds.
It may seem ungracious to carp that the authors have not done even more than they so meritoriously have, but the book could only have been improved by more extensive discussions of geographic variation in the birds treated here. Obviously, the precise status and distribution of certain polytypic species are considerably less well known in Mexico than they are in northern North America, but even a tentative sketch would have been tremendously useful.