Jon L. Dunn

nonfiction/bird guide illustrated with color paintings and helpful range maps

found this old 4th ed (2002) in the used pile and picked it up to help with my casual (very amateur) birding. As mentioned in other reviews, the names and taxonomies of various species are updated annually so some of this info will be out of date, but then again climate change probably makes even the newest editions out of date. Supplementing with eBird resources (online and app) as well as Cornell's Merlin app (for identifying songs and calls by sound, since most birds are hard to actually spot) helps a lot.

My edition doesn't have thumb tabs, but there is a handy "Quick-find" index at the back of the book to point to relevant pages.… (more)

I'm not a birder but of course I love hummingbirds (who doesn't?). I appreciated the author's quest to see these beauties wherever they occur but was saddened by his observations of factors leading to the decline of many species.

He did a nice job of integrating historical and cultural backgrounds of the places he traveled, and this was perhaps more interesting to me than the actual bird content.

I intend to number and cross-reference the photo plates. Wish the publisher had done that.… (more)

Canada is home to such a limited number of hummingbirds, so the variety portrayed in this book is simply stunning - the diversity of colours and sizes, the elaborate headdress on the Rufous-crested Coquette, the fancy "earrings" on the Sparkling Violetear, and the amazing tail on the Marvellous Spatuletail have to be seen to be believed. And then there's the beak almost as long as the body on the Sword-billed Hummingbird. These are feisty little birds with a very long history. Dunn delves into the mythology and the commerce surrounding hummingbirds to provide a rounded picture of these birds place in our universe.… (more)