Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America [Paperback]

Ted Floyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2008

Enjoy birding like never before. A complete guide to birds with superb color photography, up-to-date and detailed range maps, clear and concise text, and a DVD of birdsongs. 1.50 inches tall x 6.00 inches long x 8.00 inches wide

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This new field guide provides a suite of modern tools to effectively aid in the identification of more than 750 species of birds across North America. It introduces a "whole bird" approach by concisely gathering a collection of information about birds into one portable and well-organized volume.

• 2,000 stunning color photographs of birds in natural habitats show the most important field marks, regional population differences, life stages, and behaviors
• 700-plus detailed and up-to-date color range maps show summer, migration, winter, year-round, and rare but regular occurrences of every major species
• A DVD of birdsongs for 138 major species (587 vocalizations in all for 5½ hours of play); each high-quality MP3 file is embedded with an image of the bird, perfect to view on home computers and portable MP3 players
• Concise descriptions of habits and ecology, age-related and seasonal differences, regional forms, vocalization, and informative captions pointing out the most important aspects of the bird
• 46 group essays with information outlining taxonomy, feeding, migration, habitats, behaviors, and conservation status
• A thorough and accessible introduction to birds and birding includes sections on parts of a bird, plumage and molt, food and feeding, migration, habitats, conservation, tips on bow to become a better birder, and more
• A detailed glossary of terms, species checklist, and quick index

The new Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America is perfectly designed to give birders the most powerful and user-friendly collection of information to carry into the field or wherever they enjoy learning about birds and nature.

A Look (and Listen) Inside the Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America
Click on an image below to sample one of the 587 different downloadable bird songs included with the guide.

American Wigeon	Common Loon	Mallard
Red-Winged Blackbird	Mourning Dove	Northern Cardinal

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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This new Smithsonian field guide, written by Birding magazine editor Floyd, is ideal for beginners, but also has formidable resources for experienced birders. What gives this guide the most value is the included CD-ROM, with 587 songs and calls (for 138 bird species) in mp3 format. Not only are they an immense improvement on written descriptions (frequently incomprehensible), they're field-ready-just download them onto your favorite mp3 player. The text is generally thorough, but the focus is on images; each bird's entry is accompanied by at least two photographs and often more, showing specimens in flight, variations in coloring, and differences among males, females and juveniles. Compared with similar guides from National Geographic, Floyd's has considerably less textual description, helpful in identifying rarer birds and hybrids, but the strikingly crisp photography compensates. Appropriate for even elementary-age readers, the book's excellent range maps are very clear, and the introduction to each group is readable and highly informative. Clean design, sharp (not heavy) print and moisture-resistant materials make it perfect for field use. Birders of any experience level will be happy with this volume on their bookshelf.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Pap/DVD edition (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061120405
• ISBN-13: 978-0061120404
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WONDERFUL ADDITION TO MY BIRD LIBRARY, July 23, 2008

By 

D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Paperback)

(What's this?)

While I certainly do not consider myself an expert birder, I have been active in this wonderful pastime for around fifty years now. I do spend quite a lot of time in the field and my wife and I do travel quite a lot, she perusing her interests and mine. My first field guide was the old Roger Tory Peterson publication; actually it was the 1941 edition, which I still have. My goodness, we have come along way.

This new Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds is an absolute delight to use and a delight to the eye and ear. It is a rather large and heavy book, quite a lot larger than your average guide and weighs probably close to two pounds. This may not seem like much on a short stroll through the park, but it is of major consideration when spending day after day in the field, much of it walking. That cannot be helped though, as the size is indeed needed to record the plethora of information found between its covers. The book is well bound, which is very important. I have had more than one guide over the years that I have completely destroyed simply from over use and dragging in through the bush. I must admit that I have not had this particular book long enough to truly abuse it, but I suspect that it will hold up better than most. A day or two crouching in a swamp should tell that tale.

The book is arranged in order of families and not color or general habitat, which may take some getting use to for the beginning birder. This is really of minor concern though and of little moment. Each species addressed in this book is covered by some of the best bird photographs I have seen in any field guide at any time. In most cases we get a photograph of the female, male and juvenile. In addition, when appropriate there is a photo of the bird in molt and out. All of these photographs are of top quality. There is a range map provided with each species which covers breeding, winter, year-round, migration and rare ranges. This is most useful. As another reviewer pointed out, we are in a very dynamic period of flux at this time and some bird ranges are going through drastic changes. A current range map is quite necessary and this work provides that. Information given on each species includes measurements and average weights, molt periods, differences between mature and adult birds, geographic variations, if any and a nice written example of their call, which I find most accurate. Many of the photographs feature the bird in both flight (very helpful) and setting. Both the common name and the scientific name are given. Each bird is given its ABA Code for each area, again, most useful.

There is a nicely written and informative introduction to each family of birds. There are many little side notes of interest sprinkled here and there throughout the book addressing particular problems of identification of particular birds. Of course there is the DVD which includes 587 recordings and is completely down loadable. This is a very nice DVD and the quality is great. Now there are only 138 species of birds represented on this DVD which may be a problem for some. Personally, even after all these years, I still have problems identifying even 50 birds by their call, but then I have a tin ear for such things. Other reviews have noted, as does the book, that these songs are down loadable to a MP3 Player. To be quite frank, I have not a clued what an MP3 is, so I will take their word for it.

I do highly recommend this work. I must say though that I would strongly suggest you have a couple of other field guides stuck in your pack. No one book will fill all of your needs as to identification. I still lug around a copy of Peterson's guide (a more current copy than the 1941 edition I mentioned) and still find it quite useful. I personally like bird drawings to supplement bird photographs as I find having the two make identification much easier. This is particularly true with shore birds. The only complaint I have with this particular book, and it is a very minor complaint and is more my problem than that of the book, is that I wish the shade of ink used could have been darker. The light color with the thin font is rather difficult for me to read in dim light. This is just me though, and perhaps younger eyes will have no problems. All in all though, this is an outstanding guide and I do not see how you could possibly go wrong with it.

D. Blankenship

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent North American photographic field guide, June 2, 2008

By 

James L. Spingarn "bird&aircraft book lover" (Glen Head, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Paperback)

As a companion to the better artwork illustated field guides such as National Geographic's, Sibley's or Peterson's, this photographic guide is a very worthwhile addition. It is the proper field-size and covers the important identification points, excellent up-to-date maps, interesting sidebars of relevant information, sizes in inches and weight in pounds and ounces (tired metric measurements?), brief summary of voice and an excellent included DVD with 587 downloadable birdsongs.

All photos are excellent and usefully descriptive by sex and age or seasonal plumage and important subspecies. Highly recommended!

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good field guide but DON'T BUY THIS BOOK FOR THE DVD!, July 21, 2008

By 

Donald Morgan "mntncougar" (Coventry, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Paperback)

I'll admit that I did buy it partially for the DVD and that's a major disappointment. Though it contains 587 files, they cover only 138 birds, and the selection of the birds is suspect at best. Including species such as American Robin, European Starling and House sparrow is just a waste. Also, many of the individual tracks are nesting sounds, etc. which are useless to me and I believe, the typical birder. If they had included only typical songs and calls they could have probably included 300 or 400 birds with that many tracks. The tracks are the typically excellent recordings of Lang Elliot, who, of course, has a library of probably thousands of birds.
Having said that, I agree with the majority of reviews which say the book is a good to excellent field guide, which could stand on its own and probably deserve a rating between 4 and 5 stars. The pictures are excellent, in many cases better than I have found in other guides for a particular species. There is also a good bit of detailed and useful information included. I would recommend the book to anyone. They should have left out the DVD and knocked a buck or two off the price.