Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Birds of the Big Bend (Texas Field Guide Series)

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

 

 

There is none better! This book, in a sense, is a classic! It includes all the birds known at publishing for Big Bend National Park. It includes details about the status and where and when they can best be found. It includes consididerable details on all the key park birds, such as Colima Warbler, Lucifer and Blue-throated Hummingbirds, Varied Bunting, Zone-tailed Hawk, and many more. It is a must have for anyone spending time finding birds in the park.

The title, "A Field Guide to Birds of the Big Bend" is extremely misleading. I purchased this book as a guide for my first bird watching trip to Big Bend National Park. With 'field guide' in the title, I expected the book to assist me with identifying birds found in the Big Bend area. There are few pictures in the book and all of them are black and white sketches. This book is not useful for identifying birds and therefore does not fit the common definition of 'field guide' used by resources common to every birder such as the Peterson and Audubon field guides. I was extremely disappointed and returned the book.

Mr. Wauer has lived most of his life in Texas. He was the chief naturalist for big Bend National BPark, where even today he is called on for advice. He is extrememly knowledgeable of the birds of Big Bend. While it is not, maybe, technicially, a field guide, it deals with the enviroment of the birds. Some of the Texas birds are difficult to differentate, and the books makes it easier to tell apart.

This "field guide" is only a field guide in the sense of the size of the book and the overall brevity of the species accounts. It lacks the detailed art/photos that most bird guides contain to aid in the ID of species. This book is very useful as a secondary reference to a better field guide since it gives information specific to the Big Bend area. There are black and white drawings that are helpful to some extent, but this publication is most useful for its area specific details of each species described.

My husband & I just returned from a week-long trip to Big Bend, during which we found this book a very useful, easy-to-use resource for listing, by species, of birds encountered in the park, frequency, when, and where. It helped us see and hear many species, including 4 new ones for us. It should be used with a field guide if one wants to identify species. It would warrant 5 stars rather than 4 if somewhat more updated. However, I would recommend it for birders visiting the park.