Birding basics: Books on how to bird

There are some excellent books on how to go about birding. Here are a couple I own.

Pete Dunne on Bird Watching
The How-to, Where-to, and When-to of Birding

The subtitle pretty well covers it, doesn't it? And since the entire table of contents is available for viewing on the Amazon website, I can hardly do better than to provide a link to the book's listing there: http://tinyurl.com/2fy9bh
Run your cursor over the image of the book to get a balloon with links to the parts that are viewable and select the ones you want to see. There are three pages to the Table of Contents. Pete intersperses the more straightforward part of the text with plenty of anecdotes that are both entertaining and instructive. Highly recommended for anyone who wants some guidance for all aspects of this recreation.

Sibley's Birding Basics
How to identify birds, using the clues in feathers, habitats, behaviors, and sounds

This book, with its more limited focus, is the one you'd want after you've absorbed Dunne's 15 pages on bird identification. Here you'll get 128 pages on this subject, with some 20 additional pages at the front on binoculars, field guides, where to find birds, etc. Amazon entry (with no peek inside, unfortunately): http://tinyurl.com/26b7l8

The Habitat Guide to Birding by MCELROY, THOMAS P.
New York: Lyons and Burford, (1974 reprint). Quarto, 257 pp.

This is a paperback I picked up in a used book store. It covers a variety of habitats east of the Rockies, telling which birds to look for in each habitat, when (seasonally) to look for them, where to look for them in that habitat, etc. The author effectively takes you birding with him, relating the sorts of things he sees. It appears to be out of print, but If you can find a used copy it's well worth getting one.

Check out, "The Ardent Birder," by Todd Newberry and Gene Holtman.  A great read and FULL of great info

 that first book really appeals to me. do you know if there's a good, cheap place online to get it? thanks for posting the info.

 Brian

binocular harness

Hi, Brian, you're welcome. Haven't been on the site for awhile, so I only just saw your query. 

Amazon seems to have some for prices lower than the shipping cost at the moment!

http://www.amazon.com/Pete-Dunne-Watching-Where-When/dp/0395906865

[I don't understand why this is double-spaced, but that's what happens if I press Enter to get a forced CR!]

While they're not books about how to bird, the books mentioned by Ray are wonderful for augmenting the information found in your field guide and deserve a place on every birder's bookshelf. 

The Ardent Birder that fins and feathers mentioned is a fine one, too, and so is one I discovered after I wrote the first post:

The Complete Birder, A Guide to Better Birding, by Jack Connor, which boasts a foreword by that grand old man Roger Tory Peterson.

bump  

I will check out those guides!

I use the Smithsonian Guides also, and they have been very effective!