Product Description

The Sibley Guide to Birds has quickly become the new standard of excellence in bird identification guides, covering more than 810 North American birds in amazing detail. Now comes a new portable guide from David Sibley that every birder will want to carry into the field. Compact and comprehensive, this new guide features 703 bird species plus regional populations found west of the Rocky Mountains. Accounts include stunningly accurate illustrations—more than 4,600 in total—with descriptive caption text pointing out the most important field marks. Each entry contains new text concerning frequency, nesting, behavior, food and feeding, voice description, and key identification features. Accounts also include brand-new maps created from information contributed by 110 regional experts across the continent.

The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America is an indispensable resource for all birders seeking an authoritative and portable guide to the birds of the West.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6866 in Books
• Brand: Random House
• Published on: 2003-04-29
• Released on: 2003-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Turtleback
• 472 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679451211
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Library Journal
Not just spin-offs from the famed Sibley Guide to Birds, these field guides are specifically designed to tote along on outings. The maps are new.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
David Allen Sibley is the author and illustrator of a series of highly acclaimed books about birds and birding. He is the recipient of the Roger Tory Peterson Award presented by the American Birding Association for a lifetime of achievement. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

Customer Reviews

A disappointing compromise
Of the making of many books there is no end, and so here we have another volume from David Sibley, author of the (large) Sibley Guide, hands-down the best field guide available to North American birds. Even that book has its disadvantages, though, and Sibley (or rather, one is forced to suspect, his publishers) has sought to remedy two of them--namely, its physical weight and misleading range maps--by dividing it into two considerably more portable volumes. Unfortunately, while the book now fits into generously proportioned pockets, and while the maps are tremendously improved (residents of BC, AB, and Nunavut may disagree...), the new layout made necessary by the smaller format essentially vitiates the original guide's great advantages. Gone are the startlingly large-scale images, replaced by what are for most species literally thumbnail-sized illustrations (well, I've got biggish thumbs); for most species, the images now float in the gutters and margins next to the text. The captions to these images still provide a tremendous amount of information, in a few cases even more information or more clearly stated than in the "big" Sibley. But the cramped layout means that it is impossible to compare some similar species without flipping pages; Western and Cassin's Kingbirds, for example, are on different openings. The great strength of the original guide was the vertical orientation of the species accounts, and now that that is gone, the book barely holds its own against the more traditionally designed and meatier NatGeo. I suspect that birders sophisticated enough to use this volume efficiently will not need it; and those who need it will find it frustratingly cluttered.

Not great for the field
While the Big Sibley Guide mostly deserves the praise it has received, the smaller Field Guides are a disappointment. They don't have the great knack that Peterson's, for example, has for giving you the precise few things you need for quick identification in the field.
For instance, I recently visited southern California for the first time and saw cormorants with blue throat patches. My Sibley Field Guide was not particularly helpful. Upon returning home, I saw that my other guides, Peterson, National Geographic, Golden, made it clear that it was Brandt's cormorant in its breeding plumage. A fine point, perhaps, but an unforgivable omission in a book that aspires to be a standard reference. I won't take it out into the field anymore.

Exceptional
The larger Sibley field guide caused quite a stir but it was also a bit of a bear, in terms of size. The smaller guides that focus on east and west, are much easier to carry. Everything about them is, really, as good as it gets: the paintings, the maps, the descriptions - a top quality product.