Reddit reviews The Sibley Guide to Birds, 2nd Edition (Sibley Guides)
We found 14 Reddit comments about The Sibley Guide to Birds, 2nd Edition (Sibley Guides). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Sibley Guide To Birds, 2nd Ed
If you haven’t already bought the bird book I would suggest another. The Audubon ones aren’t well laid out for beginners. I would suggest Sibley or Stokes instead. I’m a bird biologist and I love teaching beginning birders, and these two guides are the easiest.
Asking about ID guides on an ID subreddit seems valid to me!
I'm personally a big fan of the Sibley guides. I think the illustrations provide a lot of detail and clarity and really highlight field marks well. For your area, the Eastern guide is probably what you want, though if you travel frequently or just want a more complete book, there's also a version that covers all of North America.
I also want to mention Merlin, which is a free app from Cornell. It's comprehensive, really good at helping ID unknown birds, provides lists of birds most likely for your location and the time of year, and includes songs as well. It's fantastic and the sort of thing you'd normally expect to pay a good bit of money for.
I think the best way to learn about birds is to actually watch them, so I'd recommend finding your nearest nature sanctuary to see if they have birdwatching walks/classes. If you're in North America, the Audubon Society is a great organization that runs bird sanctuaries and teaches people about birds. There are similar organizations in other regions - you'll just need to do a little online searching. There are also loads of books to help you get started, like this one.
You can also learn a lot about birds online. Cornell University provides online ornithology courses, but they also provide tons of free info about North American birds and their nests, global bird sightings, and more.
I started learning about birds by reading books, and there are plenty of great options. Visit your local library to see what they have. Books cover everything from identification to intelligence to falconry.
What kinds of birds are you particularly interested in? Is there any aspect of birds that you find most fascinating, like anatomy, flight, song, color...?
The new Sibley guide is my favorite, hands-down.
Some also like the Nat Geo guide (6th edition) - great range maps, broken down by subspecies where relevant! - but the artwork is less consistently good, in my opinion.
Sibley's illustrations are clean, easy to navigate, intelligently laid out for maximum ease of comparison, and (frankly) beautiful. The second edition (=new) also has added life history information for many species.
I own both, but whenever prompted to recommend only one, it will always be Sibley. The first edition played a huge role in me getting into birding. :)
Happy birding!
^(edit: fixed grammatical error)
I got this book last year and it’s absolutely phenomenal. It shows both female and male colors, breeding and non-breeding seasons, as well as flight patterns for that bird and maps during the different seasons as well.
I would always reccommend an actual field guide over an app, they are just more useful, but apps can be a good complement. For field guides, Sibley just came out with his new guide, which is probably the best one you can get.
You could also try National Geographic or Peterson's Guides, they are good. Kaufman has a really good guide that is geared more towards beginners, but has as much info as a full-sized guide.
As for Apps, there is Sibley, National Geographic, Peterson's, and iBird PRO, all of which are decent and have bird songs on them, which is probably the best feature. Its mostly personal preference between these.
Some solids in my life:
I would get her This book. IMO its the essential book to have on birds.
Hmm... If you're thinking globally, this is going to be hard. A simple checklist of all the bird species of the world is large enough to be a book, literally.
And, it's outdated at the time it's printed.
The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior might be what you're looking for, if North America is enough of the world. Embarrassingly, I own this and almost never look at it.
The Sibley Guide to the Birds of North America is a good desk reference field guide that has more information than most field guides (and is too big to carry around other than as an app on my cell phone, IMHO). I do own it both ways. The book is better, of course. But, I don't carry it as my field guide.
For more than that, you may want to pick a book narrowed down to a particular family of birds, if she has any favorites like raptors or woodpeckers.
Hope you find what you're looking for.
You might also want to try out the Merlin Bird ID app from Cornell for iOS/Android. It asks you 5 fairly simple questions (location, date, size of bird, color of bird, behavior of bird) and then gives you a list of possible birds based on ebird activity in that area during that time. It's very helpful when you first start out and you don't even know broadly what type of bird you are looking at.
As you become more knowledgable then a good field guide becomes invaluable, and I'll second pallum's suggestion of Sibley's Guide to Birds, Second Edition.
That's awesome that you're getting into birding! Some great resources are Merlin Bird ID, eBird, and Audubon's Bird app. A goood paper resource is Sibley's. Good luck and patience is a virtue!
Is this the edition that includes both the Eastern and Western books?
The Sibley Guide to Birds, 2nd Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/030795790X/ref=cm_sw_r_other_awd_OM1FwbF8J92QN
For a general bird guide, I like the Sibley guide (you can use the Sibley East field guide, or the larger Sibley guide for all of North America). There are also those who swear by the National Geographic guide and insist that it is superior.
That should be good to get you started – eventually if you get more into birdwatching, then there are more detailed guides for specific groups.
For insects, I love this massive photographic guide. For a smaller book you can take into the field, the best one I know of is Kaufman. There is also a Kaufman guide for butterflies, specifically.
I'm afraid I don't have any recommendations for mammals, reptiles, or amphibians for your area.
I'm into Ornithology and go birding on a regular basis. I don't know what book I read it in, but rear neck feathers are riiight next to the feathers on it's head, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the wiki article is referring to. If I had to guess, I would say Birds Do It, Too, though it may have been mentioned off-hand in The Sibley Guide to Birds.