North American Birds for Beginners

Most bird books for beginners are books you read. Chapters on habitats, chapters on feeders, a chapter on how to choose a field guide. No help at all when there is a bird on the feeder and you have thirty seconds before it goes.This one is built for those thirty seconds.One page per bird. No chapters to work through, no keys to decode. Find the page, check four things, name the bird, tick it off.Every one of the 100 species gets its own page, and every page holds the same six things: - Two large photographs, two different views of the same bird, big enough to match against the one in front of you.- Four things to check, in order, written as plain instructions: the round head with no ear tufts, the dark eyes, the bars across the throat.- A "Don't mix it up with" box naming the species it is most often confused with and the one feature that separates them. The Downy and the Hairy Woodpecker. The House Finch and the Purple Finch. The Crow and the Raven. One on every page, a hundred of them across the book, and they are where beginners actually go wrong.- A range map showing where it lives and whether it stays all year or only passes through.- Size, habitat, food and voice, in four boxes you can read at a glance.- A tick box with a line for the date and the place, so the book fills up as you use it.The birds are grouped by family, so the ones that look alike sit next to each other.Inside you will find feeder birds, water birds, hawks and owls, warblers, and the western species most beginner books leave out. These are the birds you will actually meet in a garden, a park, or on your own street, not the rarities that pad out a six-hundred-page guide.Written in plain English. No jargon, no assumed knowledge, and no expectation that you already own binoculars.Keep it by the…