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Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America: A Photographic Guide

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... than a seabird in flight? A photographer's delight! This "slender" book is not, however, a collection of photos to be viewed for aesthetic pleasure. In the subtitle "photographic guide", the key word is GUIDE. The book is intended as a field guide for bird-watching on the last and most challenging territory of that hobby/science, the open sea. That's where one will find the petrels, shearwaters, storm-petrels and the suprisingly numerous species of albatrosses that frequent the coasts of North America. Their 'order' is the Procellariiformes, the so-called "tube noses". If you want to know why they bear such a strange name, you can consult this very book; it's an exemplary exposition of taxonomy, with ample illustrations of characteristic physical traits. It's also a cogent account of the ecology that sustains the tube-noses, of their difficult to watch behavior, and of the environmental hazards that threaten them. All of those subjects are illustrated by photos.

If you live too far inland, however, to need a field guide to pelagic seabirds, you might still see an albatross, hanging around the neck of any of a half-dozen current denigrators of environmental protections, deniers of the threat of anthropogenic climate change, avid supporters of the Keystone XL Pipeline and of the dire idea of sucking yet more carbon-based fuels from the oil sands of northern Canada. You'll easily find these guilty "Ancient Mariners" in a flock, all on the political trail meandering toward the White House.