Bird Books

I'm pretty excited about a couple of new bird books that I've gotten in the last couple of weeks.

First came Birds of the Salton Sea, by Michael A. Patten, Guy McCaskie and Philip Unitt - an exhaustive resource to that region.

It has five chapters: A History of the Salton Sink, Conservation and Management Issues, Biogeography of the Salton Sea, A Checklist of the Birds of the Salton Sea, and The Species Accounts. The last chapter, The Species Accounts, takes up 264 of the 365 pages in the book. It's an exhaustive list of all the species of birds ever found, or likely to be found someday, in the Salton Sink. It provides information on the seasons they're present there, whether or not they breed, what kind of numbers they're present in, what habitats they frequent, taxonomic information (which subspecies is present, for example), and what kind of trends their populations may be undergoing (increasing, decreasing, staying the same).

Anyway, it's really fun bedtime reading. And it will help a lot if we can make it out to the Salton Sea this winter. It should assist in finding species we missed last time, and having the kind of background knowledge it provides will help put everything into context. It's interesting to know that the Burrowing Owl you're looking at it, for example, is part of the largest, densest and healthiest population of Burrowing Owls in California.

Other really interesting facts:

• Most of North America's Eared Grebes (75%) use the Salton Sea on their migration in Spring and Winter. Estimates range all the way up to 2.5-3 million of them in January 1988 (pg. 75).
• A third of the world's population of Mountain Plovers winters in agricultural fields surrounding the Sea.
• One-third to one-half of the world population of American White Pelicans winters on the Sea. That would explain the large flock (about 100) that we saw heading South last Saturday over the hills around Oak Glen. Kind of a strange site at the time, a bunch of giant white sea birds in a kettle above the mountains.
• The Salton Sea is the only place in the United States that has a population of Yellow-footed Gulls. They are regularly disperse into the Sea after breeding in the Gulf of California, where they often number in the hundreds. Very few over-winter there.
• The Fulvous Whistling-Duck is nearing extirpation in California (perhaps already is). It once bred very commonly throughout the central valley and along the coast. In the second half of the twentieth century it could only be found breeding in small numbers at the southern end of the Salton Sea and in the Imperial Valley.
  

I also really like some of the tables they've included. Some illustrate the "approximate mean numbers of" different families of birds. So, they have a chart with waterfowl. It's nice to get a general idea of how many of each kind of bird winters there: 20,000 Snow Geese, for example, or 25,000 Northern Shovelers, and it's all in one quick glance. This helps understand how rare some birds are, too. We saw a blue morph Snow Goose while we were at the Sunny Bono NWR, for example. On average, there are 4-5 a year, out of 20,000 white Snow Geese!

They have similar charts for gulls and shorebirds, which is great since some of those are either difficult to identify or a member of a species pair that's hard to differentiate.

Overall, I'm very happy with this purchase. It was a great deal, and it's a fascinating snap shot of a troubled Sea. In ten years, who knows what the Sea will be like? Now is the time to go, and this book will be helpful in understanding what you see when you do go.

Second came my new Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, by David Sibley. Texas and New York, here we come! There's actually not much in it that's not in my Western Guide, but it gives ranges for all the Eastern Warblers, and the Eastern birds that never wander out west aren't in my Western Guide. It's interesting to read about the Western birds from an Eastern perspective, too. For example, the Blue Jay is treated as the standard by which other Jays are compared (darker than a Blue Jay, larger than a Blue Jay). He also excludes the Pacific form of the Western Scrub Jay completely (understandably!).

The colors are a little different between the guides, which is interesting. I think there were probably some printing problems in producing my Eastern Guide, as there are some minor differences in the color shades used to code the range maps on facing pages. I don't think it will be a big problem - field guides aren't supposed to be completely accurate, and we always have Libby's National Geographic Guide to use in comparison.