From the New York Times best selling author of the peerless bird identification guide The Sibley Guide to Birds, a landmark exploration of how birds live and what they do.
Designed to enhance the birding experience and to enrich the popular study of North American birds, The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior combines more than 795 of Sibley’s beautiful full-color illustrations with authoritative text by 48 expert birders and biologists.
Introductory essays outline the principles of avian evolution, life cycle, body structure, flight dynamics, and more. The 80 family-by-family chapters describe the amazing range of behavior dictated by birds’ biology and environment. Among the subjects covered and illustrated are:
–molts and plumages
–habitats
–food and foraging
–vocalizations and displays
–courtship and breeding
–rearing of young
–migration and movements
–scientific groupings
–introduced species
–accidental species
–anatomy
–flight patterns
–nests and eggs
–conservation
–global distribution
Accessibly written, superbly designed and organized, and brilliantly illustrated, The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior is an indispensable source of information on the avian life around us.
GREAT reference book A book for anyone watching birds, even a non-birder like me. Moving into a house with birds like crazy…I bought one bird feeder on Amazon. Then another, and a third. I was hooked on sitting on the sofa in the a.m. sipping tea and watching. But why do they do this and that?Library won’t help (they want their books back). So I bought my own one volume to cover all my questions, mostly.
This book has been fun toward that end I have only recently gotten into birding in the last year or so. This book has been fun toward that end. The first part of the book has a lot of summary chapters written by various ornithologists on bird behavior, anatomy, and lifestyle, using plain English. There’s some science in there, but that is good for any budding birder or wildlife watcher to know. The second half of the book is devoted to specific orders, phyla, and species of birds. It provides descriptors on various species with…
A 5-Star Must-Have Three words: get this book. Serves as the perfect companion to any field guides, not just Sibley. All kinds of valuable information on birds, their behaviors, habitats, migration patterns, taxonomy, etc etc. I know some experienced bird photographers that knew nothing of this volume, and all have purchased it. Their consensus? Same as mine. 5 solid stars.