Living in the Pacific Northwest, some of the first birds I learned to identify were woodpeckers. After all, in Oregon alone there are twelve different species to be found; over half the total number of species listed for all of North America. Indeed, the region is so strongly identified with woodpeckers that Paradise Birding calls one of its tours “Woodpecker Wonderland.”
Unlike James Taylor, I will soon be going to California not only in my mind but in an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737. I’ll be there for a week to attend to some business for Celestron in Los Angeles and to speak at the San Diego Bird Festival. Thus in keeping with my preferred practice of taking along a book or two with relevance to my destination, I’m planning to pack copies of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of California by Alvaro Jaramillo and the recently published third edition of Insects of the L.A. Basin by Charles L. Hogue and James N. Hogue in my shoulder bag.
If there was ever a geographic location that needed a comprehensive reference guide to its amphibians and reptiles, the border states between the United States and Mexico is it. And not only a comprehensive reference guide, but a bilingual one. Therefore its exceptionally fortunate that Texas A&M University Press has recently published Amphibians and Reptiles of the US – Mexico Border States/Anfibios y reptiles de los estados de la frontera México – Estados Unidos.
Not so very long ago I needed to know what the primary language spoken in Tanzania is. I could have turned on the computer, waited for it to go through its start-up protocols, opened a browser and called up Google, in the search field of which I could have entered something like “primary language in […]