My Field Guides

Here is a stack of just about all my field guides. As you can see, even if the internet cuts out and I can't look up any bird I want, I'm pretty well equipped, even for mammals, butterflies and flowers. We also have a few star guides which I haven't included. Many of these field guides came from my Opa when he passed away. He always enjoyed watching the birds out the window and kept them well stocked with food. The duct taped and tattered one is the one our family has had for a long time, then we later got Birds of Canada. That was even before I became really interested in birds.

I was kindly given the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America, The Warbler Guide, and the Sibley Guide to Birds. 

My Field guides

After some time deciphering what year they were published, I lined them up in as best order I could get. I accidentally placed a 1980 book before some others, but oh well. If you happen to know if I any dates wrong please comment to let me know. I don't know if I got correct dates for all of them, but as far as I could find, these are the dates. The books span over 100 years (if I got the dates correct)!! From a 1913 flower guide to 2014 Sibley Guide to Birds.

My field guides lined up in the order of years.

Now for pictures inside of all of these guides:


This is the Book of North American Birds. My brother got it at a thrift store for me. It is a pretty good guide, with plenty of information on each bird and a range map. Though I haven't actually used it for identifying birds, the thing that I find annoying is that they sometimes group two similar species together and only have a picture for one.

This is Canadian Songbirds and their Ways. The beginning section is about the behavior of songbirds and the second part is for actual individual species. This is the first section

The second section.

This is my latest addition, the Sibley Guide to Birds. I find the paintings of many different plumage's very handy. Definitely now one of my favorites.

Lone Pine's Birds of Canada is one of my favorite also, with easy color's separating different families I find it very easy to quickly find the birds you're looking for. It provides a plenty of information on each bird, nesting, habitat, id, a drawing and a photograph. The letdown of this book is that it often has lack of plumage's and pictures for identifying, and it doesn't label the photo if it is a juvenile, female, male or something like that.

My oldest bird guide, another guide to birds of Canada. It provides a wealth of information, with pages of writing. New guides mostly just have pictures. while this one mostly just has writing. It has so much about each bird, it shows the subspecies for some, the talons of eagles and hawk and details of things new field guides wouldn't have. Of course I'm sure you can get other books for this type of stuff, and I don't know how much this is a field guide rather than for studying about birds.

Here it shows the pages of writing, with small sketches of the head or tail of a bird for field marks.

This is yet another birds of Canada bird. It's very big and heavy, and has a lot of writing and details of individual birds like the one above.

I really like these full page colorful drawings of different species.

Here is the 1913 (as far as I can tell) flower book. 

The Mammals of Canada book, I really like this, it shares many similarities with the Lone Pine Birds of Canada, seeing it was printed by the same company. It has the color separated families for quickly finding the animal you want. It has lots of material on every species, always with a drawing and usually a photo. It often has two or three pages on each species.

Here is the Audubon Society Field Guide to North America. The first section is all photos of the species, good for side by side comparisons, while the end section is the range map and a bit of information on each species.

This is the good ol' Ield Guide to Birds st of the Rockies, Ger Tory Peterson as it now reads on the front cover have covered by duct tape to hold it together. The Field Guide to Birds East of the rockies is a good book, with drawings of male and female birds often with different plumage's also. But to see the range map you have to flip to the back and find it.

This is as very small handheld simplified Peterson First Guide to Birds book. It has one drawing of each bird and a bit of information.

Half the pages are falling out of the Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, but other than that it's actually in pretty good condition. The cover isn't in bad shape, and the pages looks decent, but as soon as you open it pages spill out.

This is a Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers, other than that I don't know much about it,

The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America has been well used ever since Christian Artuso gave it to me when we first met. There are handy thumb tabs for some of the big groups of birds. It has some information about the birds, and some excellent drawings usually of a few different plumage's.

The Manitoba Wayside Wildflowers is a handy book to have along if you're going birding or something if you want to identify any flowers.

If you're going to Churchill, the Wildflowers of Churchill is a very good book for identifying wildflowers there. When two of my older brothers went to Churchill a few years ago with my dad, they brought this book and identified and made a pressed collection of flowers.

And that is basically all that big pile of field guides. Though I seem to have forgotten to take pictures of the Butterfly book. But I've never used it before, I just have it in the collection,

So keep checking back for any other posts!