What an achievement! 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.
