Even on the days you cannot be in the field searching for new species to cross off your checklist, there are still ways to bird. This season, let your imagination soar by indulging in others’ adventures – or misadventures, depending on who’s telling the story. Birders, after all, are an offbeat bunch, which makes them always entertaining characters.
Here are four of our favorite books about birding.
Photo courtesy of Bloomsbury“A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All” (2008)
By Luke Dempsey; 264 pages
English-born Luke Dempsey details his expeditions with two eccentric friends to see America’s rarest and most beautiful birds. The story traces his obsession from the moment he saw a small bird in his garden and fell madly in love, to his misadventures with both nature and humanity in birding hot spots across the country. Sometimes snide but always hilarious, Dempsey’s memoir is an endearing account of friendship, travel and the author’s sense of urgency to see it all.