Category Archives: Science

Books for the Happy Holiday Birder (FSB Shopping Guide, Part 2)

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If you’re like me, you never read quite as many books as you’d like. This year, though, I was very fortunate to read and review some outstanding bird-related titles that you’re going to want to consider for your holiday buying. Most—but not all—of these were published in 2025 or late 2024. I’ve also included a few books that aren’t solely about birds—but give great insights into how to protect them. Of course, you will want to begin your shopping with eight or ten copies of my book Birding for Boomers—And Everyone Else Brave Enough to Embrace the World’s Most Rewarding and Frustrating Activity. This popular gift book has received half a dozen awards and even made a couple of bestseller’s lists. Once you’ve placed that order, however, you’ll want to check out the titles below. Please note: we receive no compensation for any of these recommendations (other than a free review copy or two), so the thoughts are all our own. Enjoy!

Purely Enjoyable Bird Storytelling

Let’s start with the “most fun” category of reading—great storytelling that just happens to be about birds. In the past, I’ve recommended such titles as Christopher Skaife’s The Ravenmaster, Joshua Hammer’s The Falcon Thief, and Tim Gallagher’s classic, Imperial Dreams. My favorite title from this year’s reading is Tim Birkhead’s The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife. This wonderful, often whimsical tale focuses on an extinct species most of us have heard of, but know little about. Birkhead gets totally into Bird Nerd mode by both explaining the biology and history of the Great Auk, and tracing some of the antics of egg collectors who were totally obsessed with obtaining Great Auk eggs. You’ll love this! See our full review here.

The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Also on the short list for this category is Bruce M. Beehler’s Flight of the Godwit, a must-read for anyone interested in the remarkable lives of shorebirds—and who isn’t? Through the tales of his own peregrinations, Beehler follows the migrations of many of North America’s most charismatic shorebirds, telling us all kinds of cool things that I certainly never knew before. See our full review here.

Birding Memoirs

My top pick for this category is Christian Cooper’s 2023 book, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. I admit that I put off reading this book for a couple of years after it came out. It’s sheer popularity made me insanely jealous as an author, but once I picked it up, I was captivated. Cooper’s down-to-earth honesty about his life and passion for birds sucked me right in, both with its engaging storytelling and how it broadened my perspective on birding in our culture.

My second pick for this category is Richard L. Hutto’s new book, A Beautifully Burned Forest: Learning to Celebrate Severe Forest Fire. This book is half memoir and half science book and I enjoyed both parts equally. Perhaps as a fellow Southern Californian, I especially related to Hutto’s boyhood experiences exploring the chaparral ecosystem, but I also appreciated Hutto’s impassioned plea to bring common sense to fire management, especially when it comes to protecting burned forests from the ravages of so-called “salvage” logging. See our full review here.

Oh, and if you’re wanting to learn all about Braden’s and my early years of birding, don’t miss my classic first adult book, Warblers and Woodpeckers: A Father-Son Big Year of Birding!

In-Depth Group Guides

Advanced Bird Nerds will definitely want to add Amar Ayyash’s The Gull Guide: North America to their holiday shopping lists this year. Like most birders, I have been—and remain—incredibly intimidated by gulls. Sure, I recognize the adult plumages of many species, but when you start getting into hybrid gulls and first-, second-, and third-year plumage variations, my brain and confidence begin to melt. The Gull Guide does not solve this problem, but it does accomplish two important things. First, it gives great insight into gulls for the casual birder. Second, it offers myriad minute details for those who are bound and determined to become experts on everything gull. Both of these things are accomplished with an extensive, remarkable collection of photos that serve to educate and guide. See our full review here.

A less technical book that may be more to the taste of the casual birder is The Shorebirds of North America: A Natural History and Photographic Celebration by Pete Dunne and Kevin T. Karlson. This beautiful book strikes a nice balance between detail and readability. A lot, but not all, of the information is fairly general, but the photos are wonderful and if you’re a shorb fan, you will enjoy it. See our full review here.

Three More for the Planet

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention three more titles that made a big impact on me this year. The first is Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty. I thought I knew all about the tragic history of the destruction of America’s grasslands. I did not. This highly readable book provides astonishing insights into how we lost most of our grasslands—and why that destruction continues today. Grassland birds are our most imperiled group of birds, losing at least forty percent of their collective populations in just the last fifty years. If you care about these animals and want to know what we can do to slow their precipitous demise, please read this one!

Similarly, Jordan Thomas’s When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, gives us an inside look at the often counterproductive politics and decision-making behind today’s “fire fighting industrial complex.” With riveting storytelling and astonishing revelations, this is a perfect companion to Hutto’s A Beautifully Burned Forest.

And if you’re wrestling with how to keep from being overwhelmed in today’s world, where we are confronted by one environmental threat after another, I highly recommend the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. I read a few pages of this every morning and I gotta say that it helps keep me sane in our complicated, highly imperiled world. Not only does it raise serious questions about how we all live, it provides approaches and encouragement for how each of us can truly make a difference.

Don’t miss our holiday guides to birding equipment and, in our next post, charitable giving!

A Beautifully Burned Forest (Book Review)

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All photos and text on FatherSonBirding.com are strictly protected under copyright law. To request permission for use, contact Sneed at sbcollardiii@gmail.com. You DO NOT have permission to use these posts to train Artificial Intelligence models or do anything else with them without permission.

Richard L. Hutto’s new book A Beautifully Burned Forest: Learning to Celebrate Severe Forest Fire (Springer, 2025—click here to order) offers both timely insights into the roles of wildfire in our modern, over-heating world and an engaging memoir of a scientist’s journey. Before I met Hutto—Dick to his friends and colleagues—I had no idea of the vital ecological processes and multitude of species that depend on severe forest fires in the West. Although I had met Dick casually several times through a mutual acquaintance, it wasn’t until I needed someone to teach me about woodpeckers for a proposed children’s book that I reached out to him directly. I asked if he could take me out to show me some woodpeckers and explain a bit about them, and he graciously agreed.

Richard L. Hutto’s A Beautifully Burned Forest is not only a must-read for anyone interested in the health and future of our forests, it makes an, ahem, red-hot Christmas gift idea. Click on the above image to order.

Dick took me to the Blue Mountain burn area just south of Missoula and he did indeed start showing me woodpeckers and telling me about them. What he was really teaching me, I began to realize, is the beauty of a burned forest and how many plants and animals depend on it. I would still eventually write a children’s book about woodpeckers, but first I decided to write Fire Birds: Valuing Natural Wildfires and Burned Forests.

Both of our books focus on Hutto’s groundbreaking research into the many organisms—especially birds—that depend on standing, severely burned forests. The Black-backed Woodpecker is the poster child for burned forests. This bird is highly adapted to blend in with charred tree trunks and excavate wood-boring beetle larvae from the rock-hard wood. In the West, in fact, this bird is found almost exclusively in severely burned forests that have a high density of larger diameter standing trees.

In the West, the Black-backed Woodpecker relies on severely burned forests perhaps more than any other bird species. By excavating holes, these birds and other woodpeckers, also open up the forest for a host of other birds, mammals, and other vertebrates.

Once they move into a fresh burn the Black-backed—along with American Three-toed and Hairy Woodpeckers—open up the forest to many other cavity-nesting birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. They do this by excavating holes in the trees, often many more than they will ever use themselves.

The problem, Hutto points out, is that our society has been conditioned to view all forest fires as bad. As soon as a severe fire roars through an area, the clarion call rings out to somehow “save” the burn by “salvage” logging it. Which trees do loggers take? The best and the biggest—the exact trees that Black-backed Woodpeckers need to hunt and nest in. Hutto also points out that as soon as these large trees are removed, their cones can no longer reseed the forest naturally, necessitating hiring battalions of workers to replant the forest by hand—at taxpayer expense.

Dick Hutto (left) leads a local birding group through a newly burned forest near Seeley Lake, Montana, explaining the vital ecological role the burned forest plays.

In A Beautifully Burned Forest, Hutto dives deeply into our society’s entire approach to managing forests and fires, tracing the beginnings of fire suppression to the widely spread notion that our forests are somehow “out of whack” and need to be overly managed with thinning and prescribed burns.

Climate change, of course, is a wildcard in the future of forests and wildfires, but Hutto makes a strong plea to focus on solving the underlying problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions instead of making our forests ecologically less viable through extensive, often poorly planned micromanagement.

Mountain Bluebirds are just one of dozens of bird species that prefer nesting in burned forests to other habitats. Here they find plenty to eat along with safety from small predators, whose populations are reduced by forest fires.

Anyone with an interest in our forests and wildfires—in other words, every single person living in the American West—should read A Beautifully Burned Forest. It’s a fairly quick read that will change the way you view and understand our spectacularly diverse region. Especially in this day where misinformation rules, Hutto’s book is a valuable step in creating an educated public that insists on smarter management of the lands that sustain us.

Note: If you are interested in Sneed’s children’s book, Fire Birds, supplies are down to a couple of dozen in the warehouse so order soon by clicking here or calling your local indy bookstore. Both Fire Birds and Woodpeckers: Drilling Holes and Bagging Bugs make ideal Christmas presents for grades 3-8 readers.

Flight of the Godwit (Book Review)

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Bruce M. Beehler’s Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations (Smithsonian Books, 2025)

Any birder who has aspired to learn about shorebirds will find a welcome companion in Bruce M. Beehler’s new book, Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations. Shorebirds, after all, can be considered somewhat mythical, mysterious beings. Not only do many of them make remarkable annual migrations covering tens of thousands of kilometers, quite a few are notoriously difficult to identify. Certainly, Braden and I realized we had entered a more advanced stage of learning when we started to search out and try to identify shorebirds and, in fact, we both often still struggle with figuring out some of the more difficult shorebird species. Yet the more we encounter and learn about these birds, the more we love them—and that same kind of passion radiates from Beehler’s words as he sets out on his own journeys to observe and learn more about these birds.

In Montana, we are lucky to host three of the “Magnificent Seven” shorebirds as breeders—including Marbled Godwits, one of the focal birds of Beehler’s new book.

In Flight of the Godwit, Beehler recounts a series of recent adventures across the US and Canada to follow and observe shorebirds as they migrate north, stop over at resting and staging sites, settle on breeding grounds, and then head south again for their long non-breeding seasons. Although Beehler discusses all of our North American shorebirds at some point, he clearly targets what he calls the Magnificent Seven: Hudsonian Godwit, Marbled Godwit, Bar-tailed Godwit, Long-billed Curlew, Whimbrel, Bristle-thighed Curlew, and Upland Sandpiper. As he shares his encounters, he sprinkles in liberal amounts of natural history and personal experiences about these birds to make the book much more than a birder’s travelogue.

This Marbled Godwit checked us out as we were scoping shorebirds in Westby last summer.

That said, the travelogue aspects of the book are a big part of what fascinated me about this tale. Even after eleven years of birding, my shorebird experiences have been much more limited than I would like. Although my home in Montana is fortunate to host a number of breeding shorebirds—including three of the Magnificent Seven—for most shorebirds, we get only brief glimpses of them as they pass through in spring and fall. Partly because of this, Braden and I have especially sought out shorebirds on our out-of-state travels to Texas, New England, and the West Coast. Sigh. It is never enough.

It always surprises new birders that some of our largest shorebirds actually breed in grasslands—including Long-billed Curlews.

As I followed Beehler up through the Midwest during spring migration and around Alaska during breeding season, his experiences filled in giant gaps in my own experience with these remarkable birds. I got a better sense of where the birds stop to refuel and rest, and my vague impressions of their nesting territories and habits were sharpened by Beehler’s actual observations and descriptions. Many times, I found myself nodding my head thinking, Yeah, I know what he’s talking about or Oh, so that’s what they’re doing. All of this felt especially satisfying since there’s a good chance I will never experience many of Beehler’s destinations for myself.

As much time as I try to spend with shorebirds, it is never enough. Flight of the Godwit helped fill in many of the experiences I probably will never have for myself.

Those who will appreciate Flight of the Godwit the most probably are birders who have already spent time observing shorebirds and struggling over their identifications. Those with limited shorebird experience may find themselves getting a bit lost as Beehler throws out bird names that may seem a bit abstract without solid brain images to connect them to. Still, there’s a good chance that even beginning “shorbers” will find that Beehler’s tales of adventure excite them to plunge more deeply into this remarkable set of birds. As for intermediate and advanced birders—especially those who may never get to Alaska or follow spring migration through the Midwest—I highly recommend this intriguing book that is not only a valuable educational document, but a labor of love with which many of us can relate.

You can order Flight of the Godwit from almost any outlet that sells books—but why not visit your local independent bookstore and order it there? Another easy way to do this is through the online website Bookshop.org.

The Great Auk (Book Review)

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If you are a fan of entertaining tales that blend bird biology, history, and human eccentricity, Tim Birkhead’s new work The Great Auk (Bloomsbury, 2025) will find a welcome place on your night stand. I have to confess that this is the first Birkhead book I have read, but the title suggested a fascinating story about a topic I knew very little about, so right away I requested a review copy from the publisher. My efforts did not disappoint.

The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury, 2025)

For me, the first question that needed answering was, “What the heck was a Great Auk?” I had, of course, heard of Great Auks during my twelve years observing, researching, and writing about birds but I hazily lumped them in with the totally unrelated Dodo and elephant birds. Why?  Probably because all of these birds had been large and flightless—and all had gone extinct. Other than that, I knew almost nothing about Great Auks.

Great Auks were the original penguins, conferred the genus name Pinguinus. The origin of the name penguin is uncertain but may refer to the bird’s white head or white eye patch. In any case, the name was later applied to flightless birds of the Southern Hemisphere, even though they bear no close relationship to the Great Auk. (Photo copyright Errol Fuller)

Upon opening Birkhead’s book it was therefore a great relief to learn, “Oh, yeah. Great Auks are actually auks—seabirds!” I mean, duh, right? Members of the Alcid family, their closest living relatives appear to be Razorbills, something I found delightful since Braden showed me my first Razorbills only last Thanksgiving when our family had the chance to visit Cape Cod (see post Birding Race Point). Birkhead is quick to point out, however, that surprisingly little is known about Great Auk biology, much of it speculation from the relatively scant specimen material that has survived.

Seeing one of the Great Auk’s closest relatives, Razorbills, provided a living link to the tragedy of the Great Auk’s extinction.

Which, of course, brings us to the tragic fact that Great Auks were quickly and efficiently wiped out almost as soon as seafaring Europeans on their way to North America figured out where the birds nested. That happened to be remote islands in the North Atlantic, and in historical times, there probably never were more than a handful of breeding sites for the birds. In early chapters, Birkhead especially focuses on what was clearly the most important site, Funk Island. Here, tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of Great Auks gathered every year. Couples would each lay their single, exceedingly large egg and work together to feed the resultant, rapidly-growing chicks from the abundant fish schools nearby.

Like Razorbills, puffins, murres, and murrelets, guillemots such as this Black Guillemot are members of the Alcid family, and close relatives of the Great Auk.

When Europeans did discover the auk bounty to be had, the slaughter began. Ships heading to what is now northeast Canada stopped over to feast on the auks and preserve them for food. Later, egg, skin, and feather collectors helped finish them off. Birkhead especially documents the brutal habits of egg collectors. Not wanting to obtain eggs with well-developed embryos inside, the collectors would intentionally crush every egg that they found. Returning a few days later, they could be assured that the embryo inside of any new egg had not yet developed, and its contents could be easily removed through a tiny hole made in the shell. Officially, the last two auks were killed in 1844, though it is likely that a few isolated individuals survived into the following couple of decades.

Birkhead neatly divides The Great Auk into two parts. The first focuses mainly on the history of the bird, its demise, and what can be constructed of its biology from historical accounts, surviving specimens, and extant relatives. Part 2 focuses mainly on some of the more rabid egg and skin collectors, especially Vivian Hewitt, who somehow managed to acquire thirteen Great Auk eggs for his vast collection of approximately half a million bird eggs.

A selection of known surviving Great Auk eggs shows their great variety, which may have helped parents identify them in the crowded breeding colony. This variety also partly explains why they were so attractive to collectors. (Illustration by Henrik Grønvold, 1907)

I have to say that I enjoyed Part 2 just as much as Part 1. Few of us realize this today, but oologist—a term coined for egg collectors that attempted to confer scientific legitimacy upon a practice that we now consider despicable—was all the rage in the early 1900s. It was practiced much as stamp and coin collecting were when I was a kid—and with little thought about the consequences for birds. Collectors routinely not only gathered an egg of a species, but entire clutches of eggs and even hundreds from the same species, searching for variety, fame, and fortune.

As perhaps the wealthiest participant in the field, Hewitt spent a small fortune both obtaining individual eggs and opportunistically snapping up entire collections of other egg collectors when their fortunes turned for the worst. Most prized of Hewitts acquisitions were the eggs and mounted specimens of the Great Auk that he managed to obtain, each of which has a story—and many of which Birkhead traces to fascinating effect. I won’t say more about this fine book, but if you enjoyed Christopher Skaife’s The Ravenmaster and Joshua Hammer’s The Falcon Thief, you are almost guaranteed to love The Great Auk, too. And if you do, why not help prevent the extinction of other bird species by donating to the American Bird Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, or another group working to protect our precious surviving species? Thousands of bird species are in trouble and the need is great.

Author Tim Birkhead. (Photo by K. Nigge)

Gray Flycatcher Science

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One of our goals at FatherSonBirding is to encourage support of scientists and nonprofits working to protect our planet’s many imperiled bird species. We hope that you will consider sending a donation to Montana Bird Advocacy, whose work is featured in today’s blog. You can do this by clicking here. It will be money well spent!

Late July often ushers in the birding doldrums. Having finished courtship and breeding, most birds get super quiet. They often disperse from their breeding territories, too, making them more difficult—or at least unpredictable—to find. But this year I was in luck: I had a writing assignment that would guarantee I see at least a few very cool birds.

My best look yet at a stunning Ferruginous Hawk proved a delightful bonus to my day near Bannack.

You may recall my unsuccessful June trip down to Beaverhead County (see post In Search of the Green-tailed Towhee) to visit with biologist Jeff Marks, founder of the nonprofit scientific research group Montana Bird Advocacy.  There, Jeff and colleague Paul Hendricks are performing a long-term study on one of Montana’s little-known birds, the Gray Flycatcher. When I visited, Paul wasn’t there, but I also got to meet biologist and research assistant Nate Kohler, who has been playing a pivotal role in the study.

The word “gulch” conjured up a much more verdant image to my mind, but as you can see it takes some pretty special adaptations to survive in this rugged country.

Although my June trip allowed me to see many wonderful birds and interview Jeff and Nate, my intention to see the Gray Flycatchers got squashed by a freak winter storm. Worse, the storm wiped out a whole crop of nestling Gray Flycatchers. The good news? The adults had laid second clutches of eggs, and the babies were getting ready to fledge as I again headed down there the last week of July. This time, the weather would be ideal for seeing them.

Jeff and I headed out at 8:00 a.m. and made our way up Bannack Bench Road, which borders the study area. This was the third season of the study, and its purpose is to figure out some of the basic biology of a bird that scientists know very little about. To do that, Jeff, Paul, and Nate have been banding adult flycatchers with color bands that allow field identification and observation of individual birds.  The birds have been a challenge to catch, but the biologists have managed to band about a dozen each year—and with fascinating results. I won’t reveal too much about those results here since I’m also writing an article for Montana Outdoors magazine that will be out next year. However, I will tell you that seeing where these birds nest and what they are doing was a thrill.

Biologist Jeff Marks takes notes on a Gray Flycatcher nest in his Beaverhead County study area.

When Jeff first told me they were working in a place called Sheep Corral Gulch, I imagined sagebrush plants bordering some kind of verdant riparian zone, perhaps lined with aspens or junipers. Imagine my surprise to see nothing but sagebrush in every direction! Gray Flycatchers breed throughout the Great Basin, but one of the fascinating things about them is that they choose different habitats in different places. In other states, they nest in juniper, pinyon pine, and even ponderosa pine, but in this part of Montana the birds breed almost exclusively in sagebrush plants along dry washes. One thing that these places share in common is that they have open ground for foraging.

Color-banded adults allow Jeff and the Montana Bird Advocacy team to make detailed observations about mating and behavior of these little-known birds.

In Beaverhead County, though, not just any sagebrush will do. The birds nest only in taller plants four to eight feet high—plants that can mainly be found growing in the (usually) dry main stream channels of gulches. This year, Jeff and his colleagues located about a dozen nests, one to two hundred meters apart, and as Jeff and I began hiking, it wasn’t long before we spotted an adult bird up ahead. Using GPS coordinates, it took only minutes for Jeff to locate the bird’s nest—a nest with babies!

“They will fledge any day now,” Jeff told me, “and it looks like both parents are feeding them.” Having two involved parents gives the nestlings a huge survival advantage, and as we watched, we saw a parent deliver a juicy grasshopper to its ravenous chicks.

Most of the Gray Flycatcher nests were bursting with babies itching to head out on their own—after a few more meals from Mom and Dad!

For the next three hours, I followed Jeff as we visited one nest after another, and most were jam-packed with two or three babies champing at the bit to head out on their own. We, of course, made sure to stay well back so as not to spook them out of the nests before they were ready.

An unbanded adult Gray Flycatcher keeps watch on us as we move through its territory: “Move on. Nothing to see here, folks.”

I thought we would see a lot of other birds as we hiked, but especially this time of year, the birds stayed out of sight. We saw a couple of Brewer’s and Vesper sparrows, and a single Sage Thrasher and Northern Harrier. What a contrast from a month earlier when I spotted Sage Thrashers and Brewer’s Sparrows almost everywhere I looked! Nonetheless, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to get these up-close-and-personal looks at one of Montana’s most uncommon species.

Sage Thrashers were noticeably more elusive than only a month earlier, but this one did pose nicely on a fencepost along Bannack Bench Road.

You may be wondering just where Gray Flycatchers can be found in Montana. That itself is a fascinating story, because they apparently arrived in our state only recently. The first official record occurred in 1999, and Jeff believes that the birds may only have reached the Treasure State as part of an expansion northward from the Great Basin that occurred in the 1970s. Their Montana strongholds are in Beaverhead and Carbon counties (see post Bear Canyon—Montana’s “Tropical Birding” Paradise), but it takes careful observation and listening to distinguish the birds from almost identical-looking Dusky Flycatchers. The fact that the birds are so restricted here in Montana, though, points out how important it is that we protect our fragile sagebrush communities. It also underscores the great value of the work that Montana Bird Advocacy is conducting, because only by understanding the biology of the Gray Flycatcher and other sagebrush species can we know how to protect them.

Please consider supporting the ongoing work of MBA by clicking here and making a donation. The flycatchers will thank you—as will generations of future birders!

While getting ready for the next day at the study site, MBA’s rental cabin offered an idyllic view of pastureland, complete with deer, coyotes, and gobs of Common Nighthawks. Donate to Montana Bird Advocacy by clicking on this picture.