Jan Vafa writes:

> Well, I would love to record what I see, If I only knew for sure what I
> was seeing. Please recommend books, things to look for, etc. For
> example, what are the differences between a raven and a crow? I know, I
> know it's obvious, but I only grew up with crows (I think) so I am not
> sure I would recognize a raven. Teach us, Teach us, please!!

Ooops, I forgot to add another comment about recommended books.

I personally use the National Geagraphic Society "Birds of North America"
(am I right with the title???).
I think that the Peterson's "Western Birds" is quite OK too (except for
shorebirds, according to the author of a book on Shorebirds in the
Northwest Pacific region :-).

Two books I highly *don't* recommend are:
- the Audubon Western Birds Guide
- the Golden Press "Birds of North America"

I bought the first one, the day after I landed here because that was the
only guide I found after visiting *three* bookshops (obviously, I picked
the wrong bookshops :-(
It is a photographic guide, which is usually not recommended. With it, I
mistook a Song Sparrow for a Lincoln's Sparrow the first day...

The second one was given to me, and I used it for about two months.
One day, I was looking to some ducks on the shore, and saw a guy looking
like a Goldeneye obviously, but something was wrong: it had a orange bill and
there was no orangy-billed Goldeneye-like duck.
After that into a bookstore and looked into the duck pages of another
field guide, and saw that Goldeneyes actually *do* have orangy-bills (maybe
only females) in the winter...
As you can imagine, this was the last day I used the above mentionned guide
in the field...

Well, these are just my personal opinions, and I share them ! (I don't know
if this one sounds good in English... :-)

Hope this helps.

--
--------------------------------------------------
A bird in the bush is better than two in the hand.

Serge Le Huitouze Intelligent Software Group
email: serge at cs.sfu.ca School of Computing Science
tel: (604) 291-5423 Simon Fraser University
fax: (604) 291-3045 Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6 CANADA
http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~serge/