A New Field Guide of Note

Last weekend I cashed in a gift card in favor of the newest bird guide I'm aware of, Richard Crossley's "Crossley ID to Eastern Birds" This guide takes photograph-based material to the next level by showing a number of images of each bird against a representative habitat. At one species per page, the guide is pretty hefty and is strictly for base camp reference, but it's spectacular. Crossley is oriented to the concept of learning the birds by really looking at them. He's of the British tradition of taking a notepad (and no guide!) into the field and carefully studying the entire creature, then keying it out later. The text is sparse -- Crossley by his own admission dislikes lots of text. So plan to use this guide in conjunction with, say, the text-heavy Stokes guide if you want a wide spectrum of information. This one's a beautiful and affordable addition to the bird library. For those counting, I'm up to 14 field guides (not counting the other hard-core references!)