hello tweetsters.

i was wandering through the U-bookstore this afternoon and found
several new bird book titles, one of which was _bird watching for
dummies_, by bill thompson, the editor of _bird watcher's digest_.

the retail price of this paperback book is $19.95. it has the typical
"dummies" yellow cover with a chalkboard on it, and is printed on
the same sort of paper that all the other "dummies" books are printed
on.

various sections of the book cover topics of importance to birders,
such as tools of the trade, various methods used to ID birds, bird
feeding, pests (such as bird diseases), nest boxes and bird gardens.
there was a section near the middle of the book that was full of
color photos of "bill's top 40 favorite birds," along with a brief
blurb discussing why bill thinks these species are so cool. these are
the only photos in the book, by the way.

my initial reaction to this book was luke-warm. i enjoyed the cartoons
that were on each section title page, the information seemed to be easy
to find and fairly comprehensive, and he includes a fair amount of good
and useful information (the internal anatomy of binoculars, for example)
in easy-to-understand language.

there were some things that i didn't like, however. his humor was, at
times, annoyingly silly (i admit that i don't have much patience with
"stupid humor"), he tends to repeat information from one section to the
next (which made me wonder how much info was actually crammed into those
hundreds of pages, and how much had been repeated), and he did not
proof-read this book very well since i found one error during my brief
skim (his english rendition of the golden-crowned sparrow song was
incorrectly described as his rendition for the white-crowned sparrow
song in a later section of the book -- makes me wonder if he was even
awake when he wrote that because these two species' songs are difficult
to mix up, even for beginners).

i do have one major peeve, though: he didn't even mention in his
bird-watching etiquette section to pack all your trash out with you,
and to at least check with your fellow birders (and group leader, if
there is one) before lighting up a cigarette (or, horrors! a cigar).
he takes great pain to warn birders to *ask* the group leader before
*pish*ing, yet he doesn't even mention the smoking and littering
problems of birding. (these are, in my opinion, more egregious crimes
than *pish*ing. and of course, what to do with those nice cigarette
butts ... ?)

anyway, that is my $2.95-worth regarding my skim through _bird
watching for dummies._


Deborah Wisti-Peterson email:nyneve at u.washington.edu
Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash, USA
Visit me on the web: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~nyneve/
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