Peterson Reference Guide To Sparrows of North America

by Rick Wright

Overview

An “entertaining” history and illustrated guide to seventy-six kinds of sparrows: “You will not find more complete or better written accounts of these birds.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

What, exactly, is a sparrow? All birders (and many non-birders) have essentially the same mental image of a pelican, a duck, or a flamingo, and a guide dedicated to waxwings or kingfishers would need nothing more than a sketch and a single sentence to satisfactorily identify its subject. Sparrows are harder to pin down. This book covers one family—Passerellidae—which includes towhees and juncos, and 76 members of the sparrow clan. 



Birds have a human history, too, beginning with their significance to native cultures and continuing through their discovery by science, their taxonomic fortunes and misfortunes, and their prospects for survival in a world with ever less space for wild creatures. This book includes not just facts and measurements, but stories—of how birds got their names and how they were discovered, and of their entanglement with our own species.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547973173
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Series:	Peterson Reference Guides
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	453
Sales rank:	290,540
File size:	164 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

RICK WRIGHT leads “Birds and Art” tours in Europe and the Americas for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. A native of southeast Nebraska, he studied French, German, philosophy, and life sciences at the University of Nebraska. After a detour to Harvard Law School, Rick took the M.A. and Ph.D. in German at Princeton University. His years as an academic included appointments as assistant professor of German at the University of Illinois, reader/scholar at Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art, and associate professor of medieval studies at Fordham University. Rick lives with his wife, Alison Beringer, and their chocolate lab, Gellert, in Bloomfield, New Jersey.