Review: A Birder’s Guide to Wyoming, pt 2

New artsy fartsy I and the Bird over at Sycamore Canyon.

It’s been some time since I returned from my trip to Wyoming, and even longer since I first wrote about A Birder’s Guide to Wyoming, the ABA bird-finding guide I had eagerly picked up in advance of that trip. You better believe I’m going to milk this thing for all it’s worth, but the real reason I decided to write something up about this book was because, when I was looking to purchase it, I could barely find anything out there about it. A predicament which, I’m sure you can all imagine, is kind of amazing in this day and age. So with these two posts I see myself serving the birding community, or at least, those Wyoming-bound birders who may be wondering whether they want to shell out the money for an out of print bird-finding book. Basically me about a month ago.

My first post dealt primarily with my first impressions of the book, this one puts it into practice, which is probably the real question one would ask of a 15 year old book. While I didn’t get to bird in the hard-core way I tend to when in a new place, the Birder’s Guide allowed me to be more focused in my birding, to get to the places where I would be most likely to find the birds I wanted without wasting too much time. In that way this book, even with 15 year old information, was essential.

I can think of two incidences specifically where the book was indispensable. The first; on our long drive from Denver to Grand Tetons National Park (and it is a looong drive) my dad and I were interested in stopping in a spot where we would have a shot at some grassland birds, however, with non-birding family in the car, it would have to be fast and productive. The book directed us to a dirt road just off the highway near Laramie where Mountain Plover was a possibility. We didn’t get the plovers, but we ended up spotted both Golden Eagle and Ferruginous Hawk. While we ended up seeing another pair of Eagles later, they weren’t nearly as good a look, and the Hawks were the only ones we’d see the entire trip. These are birds we would not have gotten without A Birder’s Guide to Wyoming.

The second; our last morning in Grand Tetons National Park my dad and I had little time to be in the field. However, an off the beaten path trip to Two Oceans Lake that we hit one afternoon and again the next morning produced such goodies as Dusky Flycatcher, Western Grebe, Red-naped Sapsucker and Black-headed Grosbeak. All of these species were one-offs during the trip, all were lifers for me or my dad. Again, birds we would not have picked up without this book.

The entire point of these ABA birdfinding guides is to make your birding trip as productive as it can be. To that end, A Birder’s Guide to Wyoming was a wild success, and if we would have had more time to devote to birding I’m certain I’d have many more anecdotes to pass on. As it is, the book helped make what already was an excellent family vacation into a pretty decent bird trip too. And that’s precisely what I’d hoped it would do.

So it’s old, out of print, and hard to find. But it’s practically essential for a birder traveling to Wyoming. Thumbs up.