Birding for the Curious: The Easiest Way for Anyone to Explore the Incredible World of Birds

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are 46 million birdwatchers in the United States. The vast majority of these may enjoy birds, but they couldn’t be said to engage in birding. Birding for the Curious: The Easiest Way for Anyone to Explore the Incredible World of Birds was written with these people in mind, to show what birding is, how they can get started, and – importantly – how fun it is.

With his target audience in mind, Swick doesn’t start off his book discussing the particulars of how to bird. Instead, he starts with a simple question: why birds? Why birds, indeed? I’m sure every birder has been asked that at one time or another. Swick’s answer is that “bird-watching is a quest for the remarkable, the beautiful, the incredible.” It can lead you to make discoveries, contribute to science, even go on adventures. The author urges his readers to first go outside and find some birds. You don’t have to be able to identify them just yet, just find some and see what they are doing. Get out, open up your eyes and senses to the world around you. You will notice things that escaped your attention before. That’s all it takes to be a birder.

Still, you’re going to want some tools of the trade. Namely, binoculars and a field guide. Birding for the Curious gives the basic information for each, such as what the numbers for binoculars mean and the structure of field guides. It goes into greater details on some topics, such as porro vs roof prisms for binoculars and illustrations vs photos for field guides. The author gives some suggestions for both, but urges the reader to look them over and try them out first, before purchasing. Once you have your field guide and optics, he walks you through the basics of their use.

From there, you come to topics such as the basics of identification, how to connect with other birders, and attracting birds you your yard. I was especially pleased to see a chapter devoted to citizen science, describing how birders can contribute to the science of ornithology. Bird counts and surveys are mentioned, but the most attention is given to eBird, which is appropriate as it’s something that any birder, regardless of skill level, can use to make their birding not only more productive, but also useful to science.

The chapters aren’t long, just a dozen-or-so pages at most, plus an introductory page and one or more “activities”, such as adjusting your binoculars, field sketching, and making suet. They present the most important information without getting bogged down in too many details.

Nate Swick is an excellent birder (as I can attest to firsthand), but perhaps an even better communicator. I’ve long enjoyed Swick’s writing on various websites, including his own (The Drinking Bird) and multi-author blogs such as 10,000 Birds and the American Birding Association, where his writing is clear and fun to read. I’m pleased to say that is also the case in this, his first book. The tone is informal and chatty, as appropriate for the topic.

The easiest way to get people interested in watching birds is to show them birds. So you would think that a book like this would be filled with fantastic illustrations of birds and birders. And you would be somewhat right. The primary illustrations in Birding for the Curious are drawings by Robert Brandt. They are stylized somewhat, not slavishly detailed. They look nice, and give the book its own style, but I’m not sure that they are any more effective than photographs would be. Well, I’m not so sure about that, as photos are the book’s biggest issue.

In several instances a list of birds is presented, such as common birds useful for size comparisons and an appendix of birds that take more effort to see, illustrated by photos that just don’t look very good. They appear “fuzzy”, as if the source photo was very low-resolution or there was an issue in the printing process (which seems unlikely since the rest of the book looks great). They are also small (just larger than 1.5 inches, square), and many don’t show the bird very well to begin with. For instance, a Song Sparrow here looks more like a Savannah to me. I’m probably wrong about that – the photo was taken by Swick himself, and I’m sure he can identify a Song Sparrow – but it demonstrates the issue with these photos. Birding for the Curious isn’t a field guide, so this isn’t a fundamentally fatal issue. Still, I think it would have been more effective with larger, better – and better reproduced – photographs.

Recommendation

That birding is a fun, fulfilling, and accessible hobby should be an inescapable conclusion to anyone who reads Birding for the Curious: The Easiest Way for Anyone to Explore the Incredible World of Birds. This book is ideal for anyone who enjoys birds and contemplates taking that next step into birding. It will nudge you along, guiding you through what you need to know, without burdening with too much information.

To those who have already committed to giving birding a try, or who crave all the information they can get, I would recommend Pete Dunne on Bird Watching (2nd edition). It elaborates further on many topics, and goes on to discuss things such as spotting scopes and specialty bird guides.