Book of Birds: Introduction to Ornithology (Gideon Lincecum Nature and Environment Series) Hardcover – October 14, 2020

Great book, gives a good background in basic ornithology. I was a student of Dr. Faaborgh and still have his 1988 manual. This book is excellent for both student and armature bird nerds. 🐦

This is a pretty good book, although some of Faaborg's views are a bit dated (as he himself admits) and it very much reflects his interests rather than general ornithology. The latter "problem" is okay since other books cover other stuff in more detail, for instance, non-reproductive anatomy. The *real* problem is with the proofreading, especially of the figures. In many cases, the figure caption doesn't fully explain what's in the figure. In a couple of cases, the caption is missing. In at least one figure the caption is overleaf from the figure itself, which is darned confusing. But the biggest problem is that the caption headings and the layout of the figures don't matched. "Left" and "right" should actually be "top" and "bottom". You can usually figure out what's going on, but it's distracting, to say the least. If the next edition was proofread more carefully, I would probably give it five stars.