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Title: Stokes Guide to Bird Behavior, Volume 3 by Lillian Stokes, Donald Stokes ISBN: 0-316-81717-1 Publisher: Little, Brown Pub. Date: 22 March, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The birds ARE in order (contra the most recent review)
Comment: Most books about birds present the species in 'phylogenetic' order, a conventional sequence intended to show the apparent relationships between species. This book, for example, begins with a loon (long considered the most primitive of extant North American species, though recently replaced by the waterfowl) and ends with a hummingbird (a relatively advanced family of 'pre-passerines'); the owls, for example, are kept together to show their relatively close evolutionary ties. Ordering the birds alphabetically, by color, or in any other of the artificial schemes one occasionally encounters, results in scattering closely related species throughout the book, and in the case of alphabetical order, requires revision with every nomenclatural change (does that funny-looking red-billed rallid go under 'm' for 'moorhen' or 'g' for 'gallinule'?).
It's great that the reviewer prepared an alphabetical index, but all birders eventually grow accustomed to phylogenetic order and use it without thinking about it at all.
Rating: 4
Summary: Good Information to Better Understand Your Feathered Friends
Comment: The Stokes Guides to Bird Behavior are great little references for backyard bird-watching. You may have to wander a little further than your backyard to observe some of these species, but the birds in your neighborhood are probably in one of the three Stokes volumes. Each Stokes Guide to Bird Behavior features 25 common North American bird species. For each species, the authors explain visual displays, auditory displays, territory courtship, nest-building, breeding, plumage and seasonal movement, and provide a calendar so that you can clearly see when these behaviors occur. I wouldn't take any generalizations about bird behavior too seriously because many birds are very individual, and their behaviors and social customs vary accordingly. But these books will give you a good basis for understanding and predicting the behavior of your avian neighbors. You'll enjoy watching your littled feathered friends all the more with the added understanding the Stokes Guides provide.
My one complaint about these books is that the bird species are not in any particluar order in the books, and neither are they indexed. If you look at the table of contents you will see that the species are not in alpahbetical or any other order, and there is no sense to which birds are in which volume or where they are placed in the book. In other words, you have to read through the entire list of 25 species in the table of contents, in each book, to locate the species you want. I have no explanation for this, and I made an index for the books myself to save me from the frustration involved every time I want to look up a species. That is the reason I gave the book(s) 4 stars instead of 5.
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Title: The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior by David Allen Sibley ISBN: 0679451234 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 02 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: Stokes Guide to Observing Insect Lives by Donald Stokes ISBN: 0316817279 Publisher: Little, Brown Pub. Date: 30 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $19.99 |
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Title: The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds;Including All Species That Regularly Breed North of Mexico by Paul Ehrlich, David Dobkin, Darryl Wheye ISBN: 0671659898 Publisher: Fireside Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1988 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Stokes Guide to Animal Tracking and Behavior by Donald W. Stokes, Lillian Q. Stokes ISBN: 0316817341 Publisher: Little, Brown Pub. Date: 30 September, 1987 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Pete Dunne on Bird Watching: The How-To, Where-To, Where-To, and When-To of Birding by Pete Dunne ISBN: 0395906865 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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