John Yow

This book was great! I've complained before about some authors of "popular audience" birding books and essays injecting lame humor into their prose in an attempt to cover up the nerdiness of reading about birds and birding. It usually fails miserably and sours the value of the information contained within. Yow, however, manages to convey A LOT of information about some of our more common "yard birds" and still effectively pulls off a little humor here and there. Mostly it's mild off-handed self-deprecation, which I can enjoy in small amounts. The book is broken down into seasons, and then several page chapters devoted to each bird commonly seen within that season (Yow lives in Georgia, so this will differ regionally). Throughout the text, Yow artfully sprinkles quotes and observations from some of the most illustrious bird writers of the 19th and 20th centuries (Audubon himself is well represented). He does so in a way that teases out their personalities and really brings these scientists and naturalists to life on the page. The real stars, though, are the birds themselves, and Yow showcases the most fascinating aspects of the lives of many of our more frequently seen birds. I learned so much from this book, and finished it craving similar lively descriptions of other familiar birds (the Gray Catbird, for instance, was conspicuously missing). Yow claims that there will be no further volumes, but I can already see potential demand for them on the horizon.… (meer)