How to Choose Specialty Field Guides for Specific Bird Species

Video Transcript

"Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I direct the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Important Bird Areas Program for Massachusetts. Today, we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts. And, we're going to be talking about the equipment needed to get one started in birding. Now, a few moments ago, we talked a little bit about field guides in a general sense. There are other field guides that are far more specific. So that for individuals who are particularly interested in a group of birds or who want more information about one or another families of birds, there are guides, for example, to Warblers, which only features this very large and colorful group of birds. A field guide like this is one that utilizes both color photographs and paintings to make the point. There are others that are strictly photo guides. This is one to North American Raptors, where we find high quality photographs combined with relatively minimal text letting the images stand on their own. A recent guide to Shorebirds has some very creative elements in it that incorporates birds in very natural situations. The way they're actually seen in the field, rather than being exclusively high quality bird portraits. So, a book of this sort is often useful. Some of them can feature, some of the little brown jobs, like Sparrows, for example, which can be a group of birds that many people find confusing. So, that the photographs in a book like this can be very useful. And then there are what are called monographs, which basically address one particular species. And, I deliberately selected the Ivory Billed Woodpecker as one that has received a lot of acclaim of late since this is a bird that was long thought to be extinct, and now there's great controversy over whether or not the species may still exist. So, for somebody who wants a lot of information about one very individual bird, there are lots of books that address single species such as this on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker."