Best Bird Books of 2018

This list is always hard to come up with. What to include? 2018 saw the publication of several field guides and family ID guides, but only one of the ones I saw really stood out enough for me to include here. (I haven’t spent enough time with Pete Dunne and Keven Karlson’s Gulls Simplified yet to get a good feel for it.) But I had no trouble at all in picking out my absolute favorite book of the year:

• The Ascent of Birds: How Modern Science is Revealing their Story
  by John Reilly

  If you would have told me that a book on bird evolution – dealing extensively with concepts such as neoteny, palaeognaths, and vicariance – would make a fascinating, engaging – entertaining, even – read, I would have wondered just how many code 6 birds you had on your list. But Reilly pulls it off. The key is the last word in the subtitle – story. This is more narrative than textbook. He tells the stories of selected bird families, using each to highlight key concepts, building up an understanding of the origin of birds. It’s so well done that I have no problem recommending it to anyone who enjoys learning about birds, as well as putting it on the top of this list.

• The Splendor of Birds: Art and Photographs From National Geographic
  by Catherine Herbert Howell and National Geographic

  A visual feast. This large, coffee-table book presents photographs and artwork from National Geographic’s magazine and books from their beginning until now. I’ve seen many collections of bird art, and this is one of the best. These images are technically sound and aesthetically beautiful, as you would expect. But they are also interesting – they tell a story, make you think, or simply present a perspective that you’ve never seen before.

• The Wall of Birds: One Planet, 243 Families, 375 Million Years
  by Jane Kim, with Thayer Walker

  The Wall of Birds is a huge, ambitious mural adorning some interior walls at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This book presents, both in detail and in whole, the artwork by Jane Kim. But it is much more than that. The artist provides insight into the process, from ideation and species selection through the practicalities of putting them on the wall. The mural is a celebration of the diversity and evolution of birds, so we also get some notes on a few of the more interesting family representatives. Surprisingly, I was much more impressed by the words here than the images. The artwork in the book is nice, but I have a feeling that needs to be seen in person. The text, however, whether it’s discussing the artistic process, a particular bird, or the ideas behind the mural, is fascinating. Whether you’ve seen this mural in person or not (I’m in the latter category, but after reading this book I plan on rectifying that some day), this book is highly recommended to fans of art, birds, or, especially, both.

• Birds of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rican, and Panama
  by Andrew C. Vallely and Dale Dyer

  This is just a really well-done field guide. The format is just right – a book slightly larger than could be comfortably carried in the field, but allowing for larger illustrations on less-crowded plates. The artwork is also really nice. There are many other guides that cover portions of this territory, and you may also want one of them with you. But I can’t imagine anyone birding this area that wouldn’t want want this guide with them.

• Warblers & Woodpeckers: A Father-Son Big Year of Birding
  by Sneed B. Collard III

  I can’t resist a good big year book, and this is a good one, if different from most such books. This duo doesn’t see a record number of species, actually not a great many at all by big year narrative standards, but that wasn’t the point. This is a warm, amusing, feel-good story.

If I didn’t include your favorite(s), I would love to hear about it in the comments. Finally, here are a few other best-of lists:

• GrrlScientest for Forbes
• Birdbooker
• Donna Schulman on the American Birding podcast

Posted by Grant McCreary on December 23rd, 2018.