I’ve been to Yellowstone twice, and spent about a dozen days there so I’m hardly an expert but I can tell you that few people go there to see the birds. We all go there to see geysers (and the wonderful Grand Prismatic Spring), Grizzly Bears, Black Bears, Grey Wolves, Moose and Bison. But there are birds there too (see my blog post of 6 June 2011 which shows I noticed some – click here). This is an impressive book about those birds.
It’s not an identification guide nor a where to go guide (though you get some of both of those things) it’s a series of essays which tell you about the birds of this massive upland National Park – their numbers, history, ecology etc. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I enjoyed it very much indeed.
This book is a useful guide for visitors to Yellowstone, and will help them understand more about the avian history and ecology of the place, but they’ll still spend more time looking at geology and large mammals than the birds.
The cover? Very attractive and a very appropriate species to choose but it is a bit grey (or gray!) and the background doesn’t conjure up the wide open spaces of Yellowstone. But I’d give it 7/10.
Yellowstone’s Birds: diversity and abundance in the world’s first National Park by Douglas W. Smith, Lauren E. Walker and Katharine E. Duffy is published by Princeton University Press.
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