What do you think is the best field guide for beginning birders?

I have a friend who is starting to get into birding, and I want to get him a field guide as a present for our trip to Arizona.

So which guide do you think is best for a beginner?

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Without question. Without reservation. I highly recommend Peterson's. The organization, easy access, distinctive characteristics, range maps, etc., make Peterson's the unqualified best in bird field guides, particularly for beginners.


http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/peterson/petersonhome.cfm
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/peterson/bird.cfm
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/peterson/bird2.cfm



Description: Peterson First Guides are the first books the beginning naturalist needs. Condensed versions of the famous Peterson Field Guides, the First Guides focus on the animals, plants, and other natural things you are most likely to see. They make it fun to get into the field and easy to progress to the full-fledged Peterson Guides.
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=681338

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I learned on Peterson, but since having used sibley's as my main guide, I have to go with it for beginners as well as experienced birders.

My reasons:

Range maps on same page as bird description
Clarity of illustrations
Layout (Peterson's I feel has too much going on with each page - Sibley's puts each bird by itself with the text for the bird)

I noted that for myself, when I switched from Peterson to Sibley, my identification rate went up quite a bit.

The NG guide is a real good one to have to throw in a suitcase when you travel, so you always have a guide that will be relevant in NA no matter where you are.

with Sibley or Natty Geo as a backup?

I use the Audubon Master Guide for backup when doing serious birding. Peterson's was my bible for 30 years but Sibley's is the stuff today.

in that there's too much going on with the design - I picked it up in the store and immediately knew I would never use it (plus the background colors are hideous). The design of the Sibley book is the key element - in my opinion it's the most user friendly.

The pictures are great and one of the things I like is that they have a pretty large paragraph for each bird. Lots of info.

by National Geographic Society, second edition, ISBN 0-87044-692-4. It includes pictures of juvenile birds and pictures of male and female adults. It has maps that tell the range of each bird they list whether it be the winter range or breeding range. It also includes a good bit of information about each bird listed. I highly recommend this one or at least some edition of it. I have tried many field guides and this one is the only one that helped me identify for certain a red cockaded woodpecker years ago at my old homeplace. Many of the other did not include endangered species, other than a small note about them. This one has lots of different types of birds from predatory birds to songbirds and almost everything in between. Others I have tried only paled in comparison.

It may not be the best guide overall, but a beginning guide needs to have range maps on the same page (unlike Peterson), pointers to field marks rather than text explanations (unlike NG), portability (unlike even hemi-Sibley).

I have the same built-in bias against photograph-based guides (the older generations were useless for differentiating similar spp), but the Kaufman photos hold nearly up to Sibley's drawings in quality, better than Peterson, not as good as NG.

I taught myself Spanish bird names and terms with the Spanish-language version of the book (Guia de campo a las aves de Norteamerica).

For Texans, the best book to get someone to get them interested in birds is actually Tveten's "Birds of Texas". Not a field guide, but it's got great photography and descriptions that tell you what the bird is actually like.

I was really impressed that he put out a Spanish-language guide.

Have you read Kingbird Highway?

I have a signed copy. :D

"A box of Little Friskies, stuffed in my backpack, could keep me going for days."

He came to Mitchell Lake (where I volunteer) a few months ago.

While the best bird guide in NA is debatable, the best butterfly guide isn't. His is unbelievably above everyone else's. I'm hoping he'll have some time left in his career to tackle a few more areas, since I can think of several invertebrate groups that are overdue for good, easy field guides.