Customer Reviews

Raptors of Eastern North America: The Wheeler Guides

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

 

 

What an achievement!

For the first time, someone has produced a field guide using photographs that is as useful/helpful as one with paintings.

Through painstaking effort, and clearly top-quality equipment, Brian Wheeler has overcome the vagaries of bird photography (varied lighting, poor focus, etc.) to produce images for each species that are,by themselves, worth the price of the book. And, Wheeler's photographs are comprehensive for each species,and associated subspecies, ranging from 9 pictures for Short-tailed Hawk up to 82 for Red-tailed! A novice or veteran birder could spend hours poring over the photos, soaking up the fine details.

Along with the pictures, Wheeler has included exhaustive descriptive text (plumage, behavior, range, habitat, etc.) for each subspecies. He has also provided full-page maps with an innovative addition of major city names so the reader can "get their bearings".

All these things make this book (and its western counterpart) the crowning bird reference achievement since the first Peterson guide.

Love this! But I'm in Texas and usually Eastern American field guides cover my area. Like my title for this review says, this one uses a different criteria. According to the text, it's the demarcation the hawks use. This is great, but it needs to be made clear in the description of the product if not the title. It's an important detail left out.

This book belongs in every falconer's bag. A book in a class by itself. The standard by which every future book on guides to raptors, will be judged.