Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Flycatchers Made Easy: a Review of Field Guide to North American Flycatchers, Empidonax and Pewees

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Field guides are an essential part of improving our bird identification skills, and today Braden reviews an outstanding guide to what may be North America’s toughest group of birds. Enjoy, and remember that FSB is written by REAL PEOPLE. Please continue to support the many people who create meaningful—and real—content in our world.

I’ve been birding a lot this fall, and consider myself pretty adept at identifying any bird that lands in front of me. Or at least that would be the case if not for one particularly notorious group of songbirds: the Empidonax flycatchers (or “empids” for short). During spring and summer, these extremely lookalike birds will often sing or call, aiding in their identification. In fall, though, the birds are mostly silent, and I’ll often shrug at the sky when I see one. “Who knows what that could be?”

Cin-Ty Lee’s Field Guide to North American Flycatchers, Empidonax and Pewees (University of Princeton Press, Ilustrated by Andrew Birch) has been a major step forward in “solving” the identification of what may be North America’s toughest group of birds.

In 2026, though, something changed: my dad received a review copy of Cin-Ty Lee’s Field Guide to North American Flycatchers—Empidonax and Pewees (Princeton University Press). So on September 14th, when an empid landed in front of me at a local favorite birding spot, instead of shrugging, I snapped as many photos as I could. When I returned home later that morning, I uploaded the photos to my computer, then whipped out the flycatcher guide. I knew already that my bird wasn’t a Willow or Western Flycatcher, and that it fell firmly into a particularly tough group of similar birds that included Dusky, Hammond’s and Least Flycatchers. The first half of the guide gave a page to each major field mark, including lower mandible color, primary projection and wing panel contrast, and I noted what my bird showed, then cross-referenced that with the guide. Most of the field marks I was noticing on the empid I’d photographed were consistent with what the guide showed for Dusky Flycatcher, so I settled on that identification for the bird. Thanks to the flycatcher guide, I’d successfully identified a silent Empidonax!

Cin-Ty Lee’s flycatcher guide allowed me (Braden) to ID this almost-impossible-to-identify bird to a Dusky Flycatcher!

Field Guide to North American Flycatchers almost makes the identification of this incredibly tough group of birds seem easy, with its intuitive layout, detailed illustrations (kudos to Andrew Birch!) and the wealth of information packed into its slim volume. It focuses on a “holistic approach” to flycatcher identification, emphasizing that observers should take into account as many visual field marks as possible on each flycatcher they see, as well as behavior, molt, vocalizations, habitat (including microhabitat selected during migration), distribution, and time of year. Each of these factors gets its own page or two of detailed analysis, following an in-depth review of every single visual field mark that birders can use to identify these birds, and which species show them.

This “visual similarity map” provides a quick gestalt for how similar different flycatchers are to each other.

For example, the first field mark Lee and Birch tackle is “crown shape”, which they divide into four categories: round, flattish, peaked and crested. Illustrations are paired with a list of species that can show each specific crown shape, and this is repeated for every major field mark. At the end of this section, for convenience, the book provides a “field mark matrix” that birders can quickly reference while they’re out in the field. “Oh, my bird has a round crown, medium forehead angle, short bill, medium tail, short primary projection and strong wing panel contrast? It’s probably a Least Flycatcher!” An easily-understandable visual similarity map is also provided showing which species are the most and least similar to each other. 

The Field Mark Matrix provides a quick reference for those observing Empids and Pewees in the field.

The latter half of the book is devoted to species accounts. Every Empidonax and Contopus (the pewees), plus Tufted Flycatcher, is covered. Each account gives readers general identification tips, and information on voice, range and habitat, and similar species that can be confused with it. Multiple illustrations are provided of each bird from different angles, with key field marks labelled, and often illustrations of similar species are placed right next to them for direct comparison. Spectrograms, or visual representations of what the birds sound like, are also included, as well as beautiful maps that show the route the birds take during spring and fall migration and what time they arrive and depart in each part of their range. 

As you would expect, species accounts include a wealth of detailed information about each flycatcher species.

Especially similar species are lumped together, which includes the pewees and the Traill’s Flycatcher complex (which is composed of Willow and Alder Flycatcher), and the last section of the book is completely devoted to comparing and identifying that group I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Dusky, Hammond’s, Least and Gray Flycatchers.

The author does a fantastic job presenting often confusing species side by side for quick comparison.

The way that the author and illustrator present such a large amount of complex information in such a simple, easy-to-understand way is impressive, and it brings hope to many birders like me who used to look at empids and throw their hands up in despair. Don’t just take it from me! I recently visited a bird banding station at MPG Ranch, a conservation-oriented property south of Missoula, where the biologists and field techs had a well-used copy of the book on the table for all to see. Even the pros are using it! The only gripe I have with the book is a small one—it could have used one final proofread before going to press, as there are a fair number of typos and small errors. It isn’t enough to inhibit using it, though, and I would recommend anyone interested in flycatchers to buy this book (and its companion focused on Myiarchus flycatchers and kingbirds!). I’ll leave you with a quote from the intro of the book:

“Of course, not all flycatchers will be identifiable, but we hope this guide will help you see and hear all birds in a new way and make you a better birder.”

To order Field Guide to North American Flycatchers—Empidonax and Pewees CLICK HERE. Also consider the author’s other outstanding flycatcher guide, Field Guide to North American Flycatchers—Kingbirds and Myiarchus.

Review copy and images courtesy of Princeton University Press. Except for noted images, content copyright FatherSonBirding.com.

How Flowers Made Our World (FSB Book Review)

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Today, we’re pleased to present a book that is sure to transform your understanding of plants and their relationship to birds. I am just as pleased, however, to present my new website, www.sneedbcollardiii.com. Some of you probably know that for the past few years, I have devoted more of my writing efforts to writing for adults, and my new website reflects that evolution. Designed by wonderful web designer and birder Thomas Kallmeyer (tarns.net), the new site reflects an elegant simplicity that I just love. If you miss the old content, don’t worry. A button will lead you to it. With that, we present today’s review!

I’ve been studying biology and the environment for almost half a century, and the more I learn, the more I recognize that plants are the key to saving not only birds and other wildlife, but humanity. David George Haskell’s remarkable book How Flowers Made Our World brings that awareness sharply into focus.

How Flowers Made Our World (Viking, 2026)

Plants are a sweeping subject—enough to fill libraries—but Haskell breaks down the topic in an approachable fashion, targeting chapters on specific plants as a basis for broader discussions. The chapter titled Magnolia, for instance, introduces the overall strategies of beauty, scent, and sex that flowering plants use to attract pollinators and ensure reproduction. At the far end of the book, he uses his chapter Pansy to highlight how ornamental plant breeding and the use of pesticides have robbed our gardens of their ecological vitality and ability to support insects, birds, and other wildlife.

In captivating prose, Haskell peels back the complex relationship between pollinators and the plants that manipulate them.

In between these bookends lie a treasure of other topics. Two of my favorite chapters are Grass and Seagrass—not because I find either plant group particularly attractive but because their subjects are so darned interesting. Neither leaps to mind when someone mentions the words flowering plant, but they are both titans among the group. Human civilization, of course, never would have flourished without the cultivation of grasses, but Haskell reminds us just how much we owe them. Today, rice, maize, and wheat supply the world with two-thirds of our food calories. Left to prosper native grasses are among the world’s greatest soil builders and serve as the basis for mind-boggling ecological communities, including North America’s most threatened avian group, grassland birds. Oh, and grasslands have unprecedented abilities to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it where it can’t keep heating the planet.

For humans, restoring grasslands that have been lost to industrial agriculture could be a key to surviving climate change.

As for seagrasses, these hardy souls acquired mind-blowing adaptations that allowed them to invade the ocean from land. They may be the closest things we have to superheroes when it comes to protecting coastlines, preserving marine biodiversity, and—like terrestrial grasses—sequestering the carbon that is driving climate change. Haskell highlights inspirational projects in Scotland and Virginia in which humans are restoring seagrass beds with terrific results. Seagrasses, in fact, may become one of our most important allies in stabilizing shorelines as sea levels continue to rise. They also provide essential homes and nutrition to a vast web of marine life, from crabs and shrimp to fish and sea turtles.

Beyond the important functions they serve in making Earth inhabitable, flowering plants bring us joy beyond measure—sometimes with the help of a good dog!

Haskell’s final chapters sound the alarm on industrial agriculture and the unprecedented use of pesticides that are devastating insect populations and native plants alike. This is not simply a matter of protecting biodiversity, but of keeping the ecological building blocks in place that will allow us to survive in a rapidly changing world. He doesn’t ignore our own role in turning things around, either. Anyone with a yard can make a huge contribution by halting the use of pesticides and replacing sterile lawns and ornamentals with native plants that sustain the lives of insects and other animals (see our post Turning Useless Lawn into Vital Habitat). Although birds are given relatively minor mention in the book, by the time you finish reading it you won’t have any doubt that the fate of birds, insects, and flowering plants are inextricably linked.

Given half a chance, both native plants and animals can rebound, as we’ve seen in the native plantings that surround our own house.

Beyond all its other wonderful attributes, I have to applaud this book for one final thing: it revealed the identities of two “weeds” I have always wondered about in and around my house—goatsbeard and bittercress. If that isn’t a bonus, I don’t know what is!

Order Here.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This review is written and photographed entirely by REAL PEOPLE and we received no compensation for writing it—even if you order a copy with the above links.

Seabirds as Sentinels (FSB Book Review)

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All posts on FatherSonBirding are written and photographed by REAL PEOPLE.

I love living in Montana, but it has one huge drawback: no ocean. This has a particular impact on me and Braden because while we do get a fair number of shorebirds breeding in and passing through the Treasure State, we almost never have the opportunity to observe, study, and enjoy seabirds. You can therefore understand my particular interest in reading Eric Wagner’s new book, Seabirds As Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island (University of Washington Press, 2026).

Seabirds as Sentinels by Eric Wagner, University of Washington Press. Click on image or here to order.

For me and many other birders, seabirds—also referred to as pelagic birds—are almost magical. Not only do they have incredible adaptations to live in what is arguably the world’s harshest environment, they are difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to watch. Loyal FSB readers will recall Braden’s and my account of our pelagic bird cruise during the San Diego Birding Festival (see post San Diego Seabirds). These and a precious few other puke-filled outings gave us rare opportunities to view shearwaters, murres, guillemots, and even albatrosses. Unfortunately, our time with these birds has been altogether too brief—a situation not likely to change anytime soon.

Part of a group of approximately 8,000 Black-vented Shearwaters off the coast of San Diego in 2019.

One of the real delights of Eric Wagner’s book is that he gives readers the chance to hang out with nesting Pacific Northwest seabirds, especially the Rhinoceros Auklet. Before reading Seabirds As Sentinels, I had seen Rhinoceros Auklets a couple of times, but had no idea where they bred. One answer, it turns out, is on certain islands off the coast of Washington and British Columbia. Wagner devotes a good portion of the book documenting scientists’ efforts to tag and learn about these birds as they nest on Destruction Island, only about three miles off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula.

Photos from Seabirds as Sentinels including a Rhinoceros Auklet, bill filled with fish, in the upper right.

His accounts of the birds range from their comical “crash landings” as they return to the island each night to feed their chicks to the birds’ remarkable ability to locate shoals of fish and dive deep underwater to catch them. Similar discussions revolve around Sooty Shearwaters and Tufted Puffins. What makes these accounts so captivating is seeing the birds’ activities “in person” through the author’s eyes, an experience most of us will never have.

A Tufted Puffin from Braden’s and my first pelagic birding cruise off Monterey, California.

Wagner, though, also wants to educate us, and provides discussions of how the world’s primary ocean currents are generated and how these currents impact marine life. He traces the human history of the region from around the time of first European contact to modern day, including recent tribal efforts to protect an environment increasingly at risk from climate change’s many ramifications.

Black-footed Albatrosses are one of the birds most impacted by human activities. According to Wagner, tens of thousands have died in Hawai’i’s longline tuna fishery alone. (Photo taken off the coast of Monterey, California in 2016.)

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to talk about seabirds without pointing out the cataclysmic declines in many species, and the author doesn’t shy away from the topic. As the title suggests, the decline of seabirds mirrors the dramatic impacts human activities are having on our planet. Perhaps most alarming has been the appearance of “blobs,” persistent and unprecedented areas of warm water that either kill or drive away the prey seabirds and a host of other species depend on. Estimates of how many seabirds have died during recent blobs are mind-boggling. As many as four million Common Murres alone may have starved to death as a result of the blob of 2015 and 2016—about half of Alaska’s Common Murre population.

Common Murres have already been severely impacted by warmer ocean temperatures (Monterey, California, 2016).

The author doesn’t provide us with any false solutions about this and other environmental problems. After all, we all know what we have to do. We have to stop burning fossil fuels. We have to stop using our ocean as a dumping ground for plastics and other waste. We have to quit overfishing the prey species thousands of other species also depend on. What the book does do, though, is raise our awareness of why these things matter—and perhaps provide each of us with the resolve to keep working toward a solution in whatever ways we can.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our other bird-related book reviews such as The Great Auk and The Shorebirds of North America.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The Birds in the Oaks (Book Review by Scott Callow)

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Braden and I head to Costa Rica next week, but before we go I am delighted—yes, delighted—to share the following guest book review by my buddy, Scott Callow. I predict you’ll enjoy his passionate, humorous review as much as the book itself! We challenge you to read it before our next post. And now, heeeeeeeeere’s SCOTT!

Sneed asked me to write a review of The Birds in the Oaks: Secret Voices of the Western Woods by Jack Gedney (HeyDey Press, 2024) before I completed reading it. Consequently, It was impossible for me to finish the last chapter without constant rereading because I became anxious and distracted, wondering how to share all the great things about it. For those of you who only read headlines or first paragraphs of news stories, let me present a few crafted comments that summarize my experiences, being careful not to exaggerate.

Order Jack Gedney’s The Birds in the Oaks by clicking here or on the above image.

* If you live near oak woodlands, you have no claim to being “interested in birds” if you do not read this book.  

* The Birds in the Oaks is overflowing with interesting ecological details that will keep me rereading chapters, and I expect I will mark the pages with notes like a seeker underlining sections of the Bible on the journey to become a better person.  

* The Birds in the Oaks is a superb example of well-crafted nature writing that mixes extensive and accurate observations with poetic prose, and mixes personal experiences with quotes from historical bird authors.  

Last fall, I was fortunate enough to accompany Scott to one of his favorite “oaky birdy” locations, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in Sonoma County, where we saw a great variety of classic oak woodland species including Oak Titmouse, Golden-crowned Sparrow, and Nuttall’s Woodpecker. (See post World Series Birds in the Golden State.)

This book, admittedly, is personal for me. I live within walking distance of California oak woodlands. I volunteer at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park which is dominated by oak woodlands and mentioned in the book. The author’s former Wild Birds Unlimited store lies only 24 miles from me. Most importantly, I know these birds. I have learned so much about each of them from Gedney’s book that they have become even more familiar (emphasis in “family”). I will admit only here, amongst birders, that I sometimes say “Hey, buddy!” when I see my first Oak Titmouse of the day, and “Hey-hey-hey” when I see a White-breasted Nuthatch.  

Scott apparently has been known to converse with White-breasted Nuthatches. I can’t blame him as I talk to these guys myself!

Each curiously titled chapter is organized around a species. Each begins with key characteristics. Many chapters start with song and call, which I appreciate since I’m late in life to learning bird sounds. (Thank you Merlin.)  Example:

“I still hear the bird, steadily whit-whiting away as if mocking my inability to follow.” (A Bird at Our Level – Bewick’s Wren) (“whit-whit bew-wick” – record to memory)

As someone who seeks to be entertained by bird behavior and science, I enjoyed how Gedney explains bird ecology.  

“… to learn all the secrets of the woods, one must know … the birds beneath the oaks.” (Discontented Shadows – Spotted Towhee) (Cool we’re on a treasure hunt, I tell myself.)

The ecological details too elaborate to be found in a guide have already enriched my birding.  Even if you don’t regularly see Acorn Woodpeckers, every birder should learn about their unique extended family groups and their cooperative food hoarding strategies. I also believe every birder should wonder how the Bushtit, weighing as light as a nickel, can engineer such an elaborate sock-shaped nest, insulate it, camouflage it, and then use it for such a short nesting cycle, all on a diet of insects too tiny to see, even with the help of binoculars.

The ultimate oak woodland bird, the Acorn Woodpecker, deservedly attracts abundant attention from birders, both for its stunning good looks and fascinating behavior that features cooperative breeding and storage of thousands of acorns. Isn’t that, ahem, nuts?

But this book is not written by or for the scientist. Gedney is not afraid to add his own appreciation of a bird or personal experiences or poetic descriptions. This at first raised my anthropomorphic alarms since I was trained to reject human sentimentality by my vertebrate bio prof, surprisingly an ornithologist who once said “birds are stupid; their behaviors are mostly determined by genetics; they have small brains.” (These prejudices were spoken decades before contradictory scientific information was shared in The Genius of Birds and several other books on bird intelligence.)  

The Birds in the Oaks is very accessible, humanly so. It is so well written that you just might re-imagine your own feelings about birds and get all warm-like inside. You just might be heard saying “Wow” when learning something new about one of the birds. You might just slow down and spend “an inordinate amount of time” observing a bird in one location. Maybe, maybe not. But I will risk one bold prediction: If you get this book, several times you will imagine walking through the woods with the author himself.  

No oak trees were harmed in the writing and publishing of this review.

The Social Lives of Birds (Book Review)

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With single-digit temperatures in Montana this week, it is still very much book reading season, a time when all birders can—and should—beef up our birding resumés by tapping into the vast wealth of research and experience of the global birding and scientific communities. This past week, I delved into a topic that intrigues most birders by picking up Joan E. Strassmann’s The Social Lives of Birds: Flocks, Communes, and Families (Tarcher, 2025).

Joan Strassmann’s The Social Lives of Birds is packed with delightful revelations for beginning and experienced birders alike. (Click on the cover for ordering info.)

A well-regarded professor and scientist, Strassmann has created a comprehensive resource that introduces readers to almost every aspect of bird society. She begins by answering the simple question “Are Birds Social?” (You can probably guess the answer to that!) Then, chapter by chapter, she explores topics that fascinate beginning birders as much as they do veteran scientists. These include flocking behavior, mixed-species flocks, the predilection of many birds to roost and/or nest in colonies, the pros and cons of nesting and/or roosting together, lekking behavior, and more.

The author devotes an entire chapter to the fascinating and intriguing world of seabird colonies, such as those of one of the world’s most popular birds, the Blue-footed Booby.

I learned something fascinating with each chapter. For instance, I was first drawn to the book because the cover showed a line of six Long-tailed Tits packed tightly together on a branch. I had had the pleasure of observing these birds in the Netherlands (see our post Layover Birding in Amsterdam), Japan (see our post Birding Japan: Kyoto), and Spain (see our post Birding Barcelona, Part 1: The Urban Core), but had no idea that they lived and foraged in stable flocks that are often built around a main breeding pair and its offspring. In her book, Strassmann recounts a study that showed that on chilly nights, the tits nestle tightly together to stay warm, and that often it is the lowest birds on the “tit totem pole” that have to endure the chillier end positions. This is no trivial matter since the birds lose about 9 percent of their total body mass in a single, chilly night.

After observing Long-tailed Tits in Europe and Asia, I was fascinated to learn more details of their highly social behavior in The Social Lives of Birds.

Similar revelations emerge with every chapter, examining birds from a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats. My favorite chapter was the last, “Supersocial Groups: Birds That Are Always Together.” That’s probably because it featured one of my favorite birds, the Acorn Woodpecker (see our post College Search Birding in California), and three other species I was fascinated to learn more about: White-winged Choughs, Sociable Weavers, and a bird Braden and I are always delighted to see, Pinyon Jays. Regarding the latter, Braden and I have seen Pinyon Jays only a handful of times here in Montana, and I had wondered why they aren’t more common. Strassmann explains that the birds need extremely large territories to guarantee a dependable food supply. Unfortunately, their main food source, the pinyon pine, has suffered extreme losses from clearing for agriculture and other reasons. Warmer temperatures driven by climate change have also impacted the production of pinyon pine seeds, leading to large-scale die-offs of these beautiful, dynamic, gregarious birds.

Strassmann devotes much of the final chapter on one of Braden’s and my favorite birds, Pinyon Jays, shown here in a cemetery in Helena, Montana.

The Social Lives of Birds struggles a bit over whether it wants to be a comprehensive resource or an engaging narrative in the vein of the recently reviewed The Great Auk or A World on the Wing. The author mentions her personal connections to many of the topics, but I found these more distracting than engaging. Still, that will not prevent readers from enjoying the book and harvesting a wealth of information—knowledge that will help you look at birds with greater understanding and appreciation each time you head out to bird.

Review copy provided by the publisher.