Book Reviews are one of the important elements of the Journal of Field Ornithology (JFO). The editorial team strives to provide expert and unbiased reviews of books that are of a more scientific nature for researchers and other professional practitioners within the field of Ornithology. JFO also supplies reviews of books for backyard bird watchers and even children’s bird books in the hopes of providing something of value to all AFO members and everyone in the larger birding community.
If you are interested in contributing a book review, or if there is a book you would like to see reviewed on our site, you can contact our Book Review Editor, Evan Jackson at evan.jackson@maine.edu
Recent Reviews
May 23, 2023This review was made on the basis of an electronic copy, so some information was obtained from the publisher and seller web pages, or from collaborators who have it printed, to whom I thank. The Field Guide to the Birds of Chile describes 468 species (illustrated by one of the authors), including those recorded at least five times in the Chilean territory. This guide is a reworked edition of Spanish language texts by the same authors (Martínez & González 2004, 2017), where the most important change...
May 16, 2023In Woman, Watching Merilyn Simonds shares the true story of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a self-taught ornithologist who spent decades of her life studying the wild birds that she shared her northern Ontario home with. At first glance, prospective readers might think Woman, Watching is a book solely for bird enthusiasts. How wrong they’d be...
May 9, 2023As I read The Market in Birds, I found myself drawing Venn diagrams. I have multiple partially overlapped circles, trying to sort out the convergence zones of “hunters vs. conservationists” or “sportsmen vs. naturalists.” Some of my diagrams became complex puzzles, like the one sorting out how much overlap there might be between people who: like birds; like “nature”; like being outside; and like money...
May 1, 2023This is the second edition of this highly successful field guide. The first edition appeared in 2002 and was entitled Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa. There has also been a shift in publisher from T & AD Poyser to Helm Field Guides in the Bloomsbury Publishing stable. The guide covers Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. This hits rather a ‘sweet spot’ in terms of geographical coverage, with the other relevant major field guides covering either smaller or larger areas...
April 27, 2023Hispaniola, the second largest island in the West Indies, provides habitat to 318 species of resident and migratory birds. This high species richness is related to the island’s diverse ecosystems and a complex geological history resulting from the merging of different land masses approximately 9 million years ago, as well as climatic changes in the Pleistocene that facilitated speciation. These events played a role in the evolution of 34 endemic species including six endemic genera...
April 17, 2023The first comprehensive guide to Australian birds was Neville Cayley’s (1931) What bird is that? The illustrations were rather poor by modern field guide standards and the text was limited, but the book became a best seller and was the only comprehensive guide available for several decades. More recently, several excellent field guides to Australian birds have been published, including the two-volume A Field Guide to Australian Birds by Peter Slater (1970, 1974), A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by...
April 10, 2023Harry Swarth (1878-1935) was a prolific ornithological explorer, curator, collector, and thinker. In 2019 his grandson Christopher found a manuscript that Swarth had completed shortly before his death. The unedited manuscript, which is based on over 1,000 days of rugged expeditions to southeast Alaska and adjacent British Columbia between 1909 and 1934, forms the core of this book.
April 3, 2023For many North American birders and ornithologists, the field identification of Empidonax flycatchers and their pewee cousins has long been one of the most difficult ID puzzles. Over the past six decades a range of top museum specialists, banders, and birders have spilled considerable ink on the subject in the scientific literature, field guides, and magazine articles, but this book is the first field guide to focus specifically on this often-perplexing group of flycatchers.
March 31, 2023Linda Tuttle-Adams has taken on an under-appreciated and under-studied aspect of our birdlife in Baby Bird Identification: A North American Guide. Her work is a highly laudable illustrated guide for identifying hundreds of North American bird species in their early stages of life. The author helps the user through the identification process for young birds, from the just-hatched to the fledgling-stage, and she does it very well.
March 20, 2023If there is a perfect if unintended target demographic for Flight Paths, the debut book by science writer Rebecca Heisman, it may be the members and associates of the Association of Field Ornithologists. Subtitled "How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration," Heisman's book chronicles the emergence of the increasingly sophisticated techniques...
