A Bird-Finding Guide to Mexico: Symbolic Action in Human Society

by Steve N.G. Howell

Book Overview

With a rich variety of stunning avifauna, Mexico provides the first taste of the Neotropics for many birders. At last here is a guide to Mexico's best birdwatching sites, from Baja California to the Yucatan Peninsula. Steve N. G. Howell, coauthor of the widely acclaimed A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America, has selected over 100 sites where birders may see more than 950 species, including virtually all of the endemics and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801485819
• ISBN13: 9780801485817
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Comstock Publishing
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A must have for Birding in Mexico

An excellent resource with driving directions, location specifics. Heck I use it all the time - Enough Said, Right!

Best thing available I could find

Although it is 10 years old we found Howell's guide very useful in terms of both identifying groups of birds likely to be found in various habitats via checklist format as well as the specific routes to be taken. His advice to search out your own remains most useful but for a novice such as myself the book is a great framework.

Great book!!

Bought this book as it was recommended on various websites as a guide for birding in Mexico. Upon browsing through this book it looks like a great reference guide for our birding trip to San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico this winter.

Viva Howell!

Do not go birding in Mexico without first procuring a copy of this invaluable book! Last summer a friend and I undertook a succesful three week birding road trip throughout western Mexico, and most of our route was planned directly from this book! There is a relative scarcity of information on finding birds in Mexico. Visit southern Texas or Arizona, and you can easily obtain a dozen helpful volumes. Cross the border, and you are hard pressed to track down any useful information - but this book is certainly the best of what is currently available. Written by the same man who authored the superb and definitive field guide to the birds of Mexico, it covers most of the important regions of Mexico(a "mega" bio-diversity country), and points you in the right direction to search for every single one of Mexico's 115 endemic and 25 near-endemic species. On our trip we visited nearly every site described in chapters 5, 6, and 7. We enjoyed the luxury, thanks to this book, of showing up at remote places in a foreign country and immediately getting down to business of birding the best spots, without wasting time exploring or scouting - as if we were at a local wildlife refuge back home!I eagerly anticipate future editions. There is room for improvement here, as well as expansion. I can envision this book doubling in scope, without andy redundancy. More and more birders are venturing into Mexico, and this book is helping pave the way. The number one improvement I hope to see is a dramatic enlargement of appendix B, which deals with sites for finding species of particular interest. I would like to see that expand to offer a few paragraphs of information per species, rather that a vauge line or two. Also, a few of the directions will need revision and updating (although most were right on!). Finally, I hope to see a lot more sites described within a day's drive of the border.In short, unless you are accompanying an organized tour group, your birdwatching experience in Mexico will be far, far richer for having this book - and if you are anything like me, you will read and re-read it prior to your birding trip until you have almost memorized parts of it.