Mom Wells goes birding
Just the other day Mom Wells told us about a recent birding adventure she took down to Pemaquid Harbor where she was pleased to find a bevy of waterfowl up close. These included long-tailed ducks, red-breasted mergansers, bufflehead, and common eiders along with a group of napping common loons. By coincidence, the same day a new book arrived in the mail at our house, “Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia” by Sebastien Reeber (Princeton University Press 2015). We thought about how much fun Mom might have had if she had had the book with her when she was watching those ducks down in the harbor. That’s because the book is replete with interesting information, drawings, and photographs of all the ducks and geese that occur in our area. Plus, for those daydreamers among us, it also covers the waterfowl of far-away places—bird species with names like Baikal teal, marbled duck, and scaly-sided merganser.
If you want to stick to learning about the birds that we have right here, there are an amazing 920 beautiful drawings so that male and female breeding and non-breeding plumages are shown along with different ages. Want to know what fieldmarks to look for in flight or if you get a super close-up view of the head? This book has these for each species, too. Are you one of those people that always prefers photographs? Guess what, author Reeber has accommodated you with more than 650 photos!
A fun part of this book that we have not seen extensively in others is the coverage of the various types of hybrid ducks that are occasionally seen and that cause tremendous confusion to most birders. We also thought that book’s thorough treatment of the various goose species, including those rare European ones that are starting to appear more regularly over here like the pink-footed goose.
Despite its possibly off-putting title, “Better Birding: Tips, Tools & Concepts for the Field,” by George Armistead and Brian Sullivan (Princeton University Press 2016), is actually a lavishly illustrated (with photos and photo-illustrations) and wonderfully chatty new-age hybrid field guide. Its introductory chapters are more friendly essays about different aspects of the pursuit of birding. Just to give a sense of the book, one section is entitled “Wide-Angle Birding: Be the Bird, See the Bird” and starts off with “There’s a Japanese proverb that says, ‘Don’t study something. Get used to it.’” Another section heading reads “Rarities—When You Hear Hoofbeats, Think of Horses, but Consider Zebras.”
The bulk of “Better Birding” is made up of sections on bird groups that contain species that can sometimes be challenging to identify. There are 24 of these sections covering species groups like loons, swans, white herons, eiders, godwits, marsh sparrows, crows and ravens, and longspurs. Mom Wells might well have enjoyed perusing the loon section as she observed the loons down in Pemaquid Harbor. She could have compared her loons’ plumages and head shapes to the various photos in the book to see if she could tell the ages of them or to double-check that a red-throated loon or Pacific loon wasn’t hiding out with the commons. The section on eiders can help make sense of those various patchy-looking immature common eiders that can be seen regularly and even help to figure out how one might go about identifying a female king eider among a flock of female common eiders in winter. All with tons of stunning photographs.
Guess we know what to get Mom Wells for Mother’s Day!
