Books like Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America

This book taught me how to watch birds. 

Many bird books aim to teach about birds and how they live, conveying factual information while ignoring (or lamenting) our human interactions with them. There are also books about birding, telling picaresque stories of extreme birdwatching adventures, or delving into technical minutiae aimed at maximizing one’s skill at bird identification. This book doesn’t fall into either of those categories; instead, it focuses on the rich and positive rewards of paying attention to birds. 

What was that sound? Why did those birds all fly up into the tree? What will I discover if I simply sit still in the woods, patiently watching and listening? When I started asking—and being able to answer—these questions, my whole world changed.

The thing I love about the subject of this book is that it is visible all around me. The great yearly drama of the nesting season is the most exciting part of watching birds. This is where the good stuff happens: song and courtship, battles over territory, the miracle of nest construction, the cuteness of babies, and the development of monogamy. 

Heinrich’s book opened my eyes to this story. He merges his deep scientific knowledge with personal observation, making that broader understanding applicable to what I can observe myself. He explores the different ways birds have of living their lives, constantly asking how we can explain those patterns not as random assemblages of behaviors but as comprehensible evolutionary strategies. He makes birds make sense.

Reading Dawson was what first inspired me to really look at birds. I was attending UC Berkeley as a literature student and spent rainy mornings nestled into the big library armchairs. There, I found Dawson’s 1923 Birds of California, a monumental three-volume collection of extended, highly personal, and idiosyncratic essays on all the birds of the state. I was hooked.

What Dawson does differently than most moderns is express personal bias, an essential ingredient in enthusiasm. He told me which birds are the most beautiful (violet-green swallows), which are the most sublime singers (hermit thrushes), and which are dull and boring but somehow very endearing (California towhees). He taught me a lot about birds, but even more, he taught me to be excited by them.

This is the best book I’ve ever read on what it feels like to be a bird. It takes the form of a novel following the migration and searches for companionship of an Eskimo curlew.

But it isn’t a kid’s novel of entirely anthropomorphized animals, complete with a full complement of human thoughts. Instead, Bodsworth gives a skillfully restrained rendition of what instincts and urges birds might really feel, carefully threading the needle between boring accounts that allow no emotions to birds and fanciful accounts that erroneously attribute all kinds of complex thoughts and calculations to them. 

The migratory and nesting instincts are tremendously powerful feelings, feelings experienced by the birds I see right in my neighborhood. Bodsworth does them justice and makes the birds characters in an enormous, epic drama.

I read this book for the first time when I was probably nine or ten and I think this was one of the books that really started it all. It put words to what I felt about the West...the glory of the wide plains, the kind of guts it took to survive, the love of a boy and a horse, and the lengths they would go for each other. It's a perfectly wistful and beautiful western. 

Though only discussing the “day before Clovis” a few thousand years prior to Clovis archaeological sites Dixon and Dixon provide a synthesis of over 40 archaeological sites that predate Clovis. Dixon and Dixon dispel archaeological stereotypes that depict early Indigenous people as simply big-game hunters and provide evidence for a diverse cultural landscape of marine mammal hunters, fishers, and general foragers across the Americas.

Louis L'Amour mastered the art of the adventure story. A story where we root for the hero to succeed and live their exuberance with them when they do. In 1965, he published The Sacket Brand, a western about a man and his new bride traveling to their first home together. Ambushed, badly injured, hungry, cold, and desperate, we live his experience of being hunted by enemies while uncovering the mystery of why it's all happening.

When he finally discovers the truth, we cheer as he, in turn, forces his enemies to run from him. Honor, integrity, stubborn principle. Persistence in the face of extreme adversity. Those were the life lessons I received from L'Amour's books and try to pass on in mine.

Published 50 years after Desert Solitaire, seventh-generation Utah resident Amy Irvine talks about her respect for Abbey’s impact on her life and writing, while also not holding back on lambasting Abbey for his behavior and hypocrisy. Irvine told Orion magazine, “My goal was not to take Abbey down, but rather to make space for other voices and relationships to the natural world.” While Abbey might be the context for the book, Irvine goes on to deliver a fascinating exploration into her own take on the wonders of wilderness. She can be as hard on herself as she is on Abbey. This book is a great contemporary look at a key question for those of us who explore the wilds: How do we keep from loving it to death? 

As a boy, I encountered Kit Carson via the Landmark Books, and I could not resist rediscovering him in juxtaposition with his friend but non-kindred spirit, John C. Frémont, who nearly became president in 1856. Although Roberts mercifully spares us from exposing Frémont’s Civil War blunders, his account of the disastrous 1848-49 expedition renders the “Pathfinder” in his grandiosity a less sympathetic figure than the laconic scout. As Roberts notes in his epilogue concerning the feats of his two flawed subjects, “pure heroes or villains do not exist outside the pages of bad literature.” He likens the evolution of Carson as “thoughtless killer of Apaches and Blackfeet” to “defender and champion of the Utes” to a similar reversal in the case of General George Crook.

This is slightly outside the boundaries of a wartime novel, as it takes place in the Old West, but it’s a fantastic book for this list, and shouldn’t be overlooked if you love this trope. Jess Harney makes a name for herself as a notorious male sharpshooter and outlaw. Her first-person voice is one of the most interesting I’ve read, and I loved how she fit in as one of the guys while never sacrificing who she was. She barely even thinks about her gender as she so naturally considers herself male. Books like this really highlight the blurred lines between cross-dressing out of necessity or desire, and I’m excited to see more authors addressing this trope with the nuance of queerness which is often part of it.