The Birdwatcher’s Companion to North American Birdlife
By Christopher W. Leahy (Princeton University Press / $39.50)
Christopher W. Leahy had always longed “for a single reference book that I could hold in one hand but that would tell me, for example, whether birds have a well-developed sense of taste…what color a dipper’s eggs are…how many species of woodpeckers there are in the world…and other such information, from the critical to the trivial.” The result was Leahy’s own Birdwatcher’s Companion, first published 20 years ago and now freshly updated. At turns studious and playful, the 1,039-page encyclopedic guide to all things birdlike offers birding at its best, no binoculars needed.
— William Stolzenburg
