Introduction to California Birdlife: Volume 83

I found this book to be incredibly well written. The background and history given on each species helped me to better understand how and why certain birds have ended up in California. I also really enjoyed the author's own personal journal entries. It's always nice when an author in a reference guide helps to paint a picture through their eyes. I am an avid reader and a novice birder and this book has been very helpful. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a detailed guide to birding in CA. As an Oregon resident I have found that this book is still helpful even outside of California.

Evens and Tait have produced a veritable undergraduate course on the ecology of birds of California. But dont be confused -- this is not meant to replace a field guide. This is the deeper stuff: bird ecology, feeeding, nesting, associations between species, landscape ecology. And Evens and Tait have successfully and elegantly downloaded a lifetime of learning and listening and watching the region's birds between two covers. This is a must-read for anybody studying bird environments and impacts, and for anybody preparing a birding tour of the state. It is as good a state guide as exists in the US on one region's rich ecology and communities of birds. Evens also has a highly readable engaging style, as well so you can turn to this over and over.

Beginning and intermediate birders will enjoy this introduction to the birdlife of the most ornithologically diverse state in the union. Not an identification resource or a site guide, this thick little book instead introduces the birds against the background of their ecology and biology, treating habitats rather than individual species. Unfortunately, the book could have been edited more rigorously than it was. There are spelling errors ("ocine" for "oscine," "nivasus" for "nivosus") that an adept proofreader could have caught, and the discussion of endemism and evolution in the front matter is oddly oblique, never completely wrong but often just a little bit off: readers may well end up wondering why the terms "sister species," "sibling species," and "sister species" all occur in one paragraph and whether there is any difference. The Inyo California Towhee is said to be a "remnant population of a once more widespread species," but that formulation could be applied just as accurately (and just as confusingly) to any other population of California Towhees. The author knows what he's talking about, but the editor could have helped say it better, more clearly, and more precisely. But the book is still highly recommended, as are all the other titles in this excellent series.