Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion

A Comprehensive Resource for Identifying North American Birds by Peter Dunne

A better subtitle? What the Field Guides don’t tell you. Grab your favorite field guide, and use it to illustrate the information provided in this compendium of “things I still wanted to say when I got done with the National Geograhic project” according to Pete when we saw him at the 2006 McAllen Tropical Texas Nature Festival.

Do the little blurbs of information in your field guide leave you wanting more? That’s the motivation for the author! From the publisher: “In this book, bursting with more information than any field guide could hold, the well-known author and birder Pete Dunne introduces readers to the “Cape May School,” or GISS, method of identification, which focuses on a bird holistically, giving more weight to the general impression of the bird than to specific field marks.

After determining the most likely possibilities by considering such factors as habitat and season, the birder uses characteristics such as size, shape, behavior, flight pattern, and vocalizations to identify a bird. The book provides an arsenal of additional hints and helpful clues to guide a birder when, even after a review of a field guide, the identification still hangs in the balance.

This supplement to field guides shares the knowledge and skills that expert birders bring to identification challenges.

Hardcover, 7 x 9 inches, 752 pages, NO PICTURES, MAPS OR ILLUSTRATIONS!, May 2006