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Raptors of Eastern North America--together with its companion volume, Raptors of Western North America--are the best and most thorough guides to North American hawks, eagles, and other raptors ever published. Abundantly illustrated with hundreds of full-color high-quality photographs, they are essential books for anyone seeking to identify these notoriously tricky-to-identify birds.

The Wheeler Guides will help birders and biologists navigate the pitfalls of raptor identification, including raptors' often extreme variation by age and sex as well as the existence of numerous "confusion" species. The plumage section discusses more plumage variations--and in greater consistency, depth, and clarity--than any previously published guide. The text--informed by years of study and consultation with local, state, provincial, and regional experts--covers all aspects of raptor biology in an easy-to-read and consistent format. It provides the most up-to-date information available on status and distribution, taking into account the recent alteration of some species' ranges due to pesticide bans and introduction programs. The range maps--which include "city" plotting--are the most accurate and largest ever produced for North American raptors.

For the first time, someone has produced a field guide using photographs that is as useful/helpful as one with paintings.

Through painstaking effort, and clearly top-quality equipment, Brian Wheeler has overcome the vagaries of bird photography (varied lighting, poor focus, etc.) to produce images for each species that are,by themselves, worth the price of the book. And, Wheeler's photographs are comprehensive for each species,and associated subspecies, ranging from 9 pictures for Short-tailed Hawk up to 82 for Red-tailed! A novice or veteran birder could spend hours poring over the photos, soaking up the fine details.

Along with the pictures, Wheeler has included exhaustive descriptive text (plumage, behavior, range, habitat, etc.) for each subspecies. He has also provided full-page maps with an innovative addition of major city names so the reader can "get their bearings".

All these things make this book (and its western counterpart) the crowning bird reference achievement since the first Peterson guide.