Given the overwhelming popularity and extraordinary usefulness of Cornell Lab of Ornithology‘s All About Birds web page, it isn’t surprising at all that the content of it would eventually be employed for the creation of a printed field guide. However with so much information available on the page itself, creating just one field guide based on it seems very impractical indeed (“very impractical” here being used to mean “jolly well impossible”), which is likely why the Lab, when joining forces with Princeton University Press to create such a publication, created seven regional guides to the bird species found in the United States and Canada, and named the entire series – appropriately – All About Birds.

As an advocate of using as local a field guide as one can obtain when exploring a natural history subject in a particular area, I was quite pleased with not only that they divided up a large area into seven different books, but also in the way the boundaries were drawn. The All About Birds series thus includes field guides to:

Copies of three of these new field guides have just reached my desk, including the one pictured above – All About Birds: Northwest US and Canada – which I shall be putting to the field test with all due speed. Be assured that I will report my impressions of their content and effectiveness here once I’ve had time to assess them properly.