This charming, full-color field guide to 25 birds easily found in Berkeley proves that even the city's avian residents are a little quirky. Meticulously detailed illustrations capture each bird's distinctive physicality and temperament. A Burrowing Owl faces you in a full-on head shot, perhaps having just raised its raspy, chattering alarm call as you trespass on its last remaining Bay Area foothold at the Marina. The Anna's Hummingbird gives you a coy backward glance to assess if you've properly admired its flashy throat feathers, maybe having just performed its signature J-shaped courtship dive. Even in composition, each bird is strikingly individual, whether depicted in mid-dive or creeping into frame. While descriptions of identification and vocalizations are straightforward, author-illustrator Oliver James takes a delightfully creative approach to his write-ups of each species. He invites you to imagine that a Cooper's Hawk, for example, is Steve McQueen in a '68 Mustang, and you, "a pigeon in a rental car with a poor turning radius," are fleeing through traffic: "It's all over in a matter of seconds." A joy to read and pore over, Birds of Berkeley will enchant readers far beyond the city limits with its findings gleaned from painstaking and patient wildlife observation.

"Whether you are an experienced birder or just learning natural history, this book will deepen your sense of place and open insights to beauty, wonder, and connection to the natural world."--John Muir Laws, author of The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada Now in paperback! This charming, full-color field guide to 25 birds easily found in Berkeley proves that even the city's avian residents are a little quirky. Meticulously detailed illustrations capture each bird's distinctive physicality and temperament. A Burrowing Owl faces you in a full head-on shot, perhaps having just raised its raspy, chattering alarm call as you trespass on its last remaining Bay Area foothold at the Marina. The Anna's Hummingbird gives you a coy backward glance to assess if you've properly admired its flashing throat feathers, maybe having just performed its signature J-shaped courtship dive. While descriptions of identification and vocalizations are straightforward, author-illustrator Oliver James takes a delightfully creative approach to his write-ups of each species. A joy to read and pore over, Birds of Berkeley will enchant readers far beyond the city limits with its findings gleaned from painstaking and patient wildlife observation.

“A wonderful book that highlights the globally unique and important boreal forest ecoregion from an avian perspective, with fresh twists. Your ideas about where those migrant and wintering birds in your backyards have come from will be forever changed after you read this.”--Gordon Orians, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of Washington “One of the planet's most amazing spectacles is the seasonal ebb and flow of migrants from the boreal forests to warmer winter quarters, with stopovers in our neighborhoods in between. This book tells you how connected the world is and what's at risk if we damage any part of it.”--Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Duke University, winner of the 2006 Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize “This diverse set of contributions about birds that nest in and migrate to and from North America's boreal forest demonstrates the remarkable interconnectedness of ecosystems across the hemispheres and the incredible responsibility we face to protect them.”--Bridget Stutchbury, York University, author of Silence of the Songbirds and The Private Lives of Birds “The fact that billions of birds breed in North America’s boreal forest is amazing enough, but this assemblage is even more remarkable when understood as playing completely different, major ecological roles across the temperate and tropical Americas during the northern winter. This book definitely will broaden your thinking about ecological connections across the hemisphere and the global-scale phenomenon that crosses our skies twice each year.”--John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived