Acquired American Museum and Natural History: Birds of North America by Francois Vuilleumier (Editor) (DK Publishing)

Ideal for the armchair bird enthusiast or dedicated bird watcher, this book includes stunning full-color photographs, revealing each species with unrivaled clarity.

A lavish introduction describes bird characteristics and behavior, while stunning full-color photographs reveal individual species for easy identification.

The 550 most commonly seen birds are pictured in clear, close-up photographs, with images of similar birds provided to make differentiation easy, from game birds and waterfowl to shorebirds and swifts to owls, hummingbirds, finches, and more. Discover which species to expect when and where with up-to-date, color-coded maps highlighting habitation and migratory patterns.

The most commonly seen species are given a whole page in the species catalog, and each full-page profile includes images of plumage variations, subspecies, information on similar birds, and artwork of the bird in flight that reveal their outstretched wings.

Rare birds and vagrants who occasionally stray into North America are also described, making AMNH Birds of North America one of the most comprehensive guides on the market and essential for anyone interested in birding.

Publish Date: November 10, 2020
Pages: 752
8.6 X 11.0 X 1.8 inches | 6.45 pounds
Hardcover
ISBN/EAN/UPC: 9780744020533

After doing some research on various bird books, I’ve picked up this massive textbook as the structure for creating a bird memory palace. 

Purchased from Amazon.com for $26.60 on 2020-12-07; arrived today.

Birds of North America Texts and Field Guides

Spent some time tonight looking at the seven most popular bird books for North America for my memory project. I’m still figuring out how to set up the memory palace for the project though. Lots of data to encode. 

While all are generally solid I’m arranging them for data/information, layout, and image purposes. Here’s the rough order of preference I think I’m going to put them in moving forward:

  • American Museum of Natural History, Birds of North America (and/or the Western Region) (DK)
  • The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America
  • National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Birds of North America, 
  • Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
  • Sibley Birds West
  • Golden Field Guides: Birds of North America

I’ll probably buy the top two as I proceed. It looks like DK just published an update to theirs in the last month! In particular, I like the volume of detail of the DK edition and the layout for potentially making memorization easier. 

Now to figure out how to best lay out the various pieces. I’m thinking that Lynne Kelly’s idea of using a Lukasa memory board may be best. But what to fashion it out of and how?

Read Birds of North America: A guide to field Identification by Chandler S. Robbins, Bertel Bruun , Herbert S. Zim, Arthur Singer (Illustrator) (Golden Field Guides from St. Martin's Press)

Spot the silhouette of a Northern Goshawk in flight. Identify the raucous call of the Red-winged Blackbird. Discover the secret of picking out a Chipping Sparrow from its look-alike cousins. It's simple with this classic field guide, a treasured favorite among amateur bird lovers and exacting professionals. Recognized as the authority on bird identification, this invaluable resource provides:

-All of North America in one volume
-Over 800 species and 600 range maps
-Arthur Singer's famous illustrations featuring male, female, and juvenile plumage
-Sonograms that picture sound for easy song recognition
-Migration routes, feeding habits, and characteristic flight patterns
-American ornithologists' classifications
-Convenient check boxes to record birds you have identified
-Color tabs for quick references

Read introductory pages 1-17.

This seems to have most North American birds with good layouts, information, sonograms, and ranges. Could be a solid contender and is a nice size.

Read Peterson First Guides Birds by Roger Tory Peterson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Peterson First Guides are the first books the beginning naturalist needs. Condensed versions of the famous Peterson Field Guides, the First Guides focus on the animals, plants, and other natural things you are most likely to see. They make it fun to get into the field and easy to progress to the full-fledged Peterson Guides.
Read pages 1-17 of opening.

A very slim, but nice pocket-sized guide. Probably the least comprehensive on my list. Has some basic names, info, and few pictures than others. Opening was pretty good on laying out structure for what to look out for.

This is definitely not the guide for me.

Replied to a tweet by Tim PrebbleTim Prebble (Twitter)
I had posted about watching Tim’s experiment and a fellow academic replied to me via Mastodon that about a reverse experiment from 1715 that may be of interest:

@chrisaldrich Everything old ( from 1715) is new again The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (Walsh, John) – IMSLP: Free Sheet Music PDF Download

Although strictly speaking, the goal here was to get birds to imitate the written recorder tunes rather than vice versa.

Jason Green, January 24, 2020 at 12:27 pm

Watched Bird Song Preludes - Proof of Concept by Tim PrebbleTim Prebble from YouTube

This is a proof of concept for a project I am doing later in the year, as part of the Auckland City Council Artists Residency, where I will be based in Little Huia for two months...

A fascinating experiment of taking birdsong and translating it into music. This is pretty cool!