The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds Paperback – March 1, 2009

Great book. I've used this in my Ornithology lab classes because it provides an excellent reference for the different orders and families. The pictures are fantastic! My one complaint is that the taxonomy used in the book is already out-dated, which makes me reticent to assign the book. The avian tree of life is still in flux, and there have been major changes since the books publication; however, this has been in the cards for a while, and I feel like the publisher would be well-served by putting out an updated version now that the avian phylogeny is becoming better resolved.

Great Reference for general taxonomy and general information on birds.As zoo docents and interpretive guides my spouse and I have found this a wonderful general reference for bird information. It was a great price from Amazon and we now have our own copy and don't have to go use the copy in the zoo library. As zoo docents we have to develop presentations on a lot of different animals and this is one of the recommended field guides for information. While we use many different sources this reference is great to use to get started on finding information on the bird we are researching. I would recommend it to anyone doing work with a wide range of birds.

I read this entire book for an ornithology class I took. Believe it or not, I loved it! The text was fascinating and the images were stunning! I would recommend it as an additional to any birders collection too

It is impossible to put any more information about birds in one book, considering the innumerable number of species that live on this planet. This encyclopedia gives a very great overview of every group of birds that is known to scientists and gives so much information about so many different species. This book is definitely worth buying if you're either a bird or an animal lover.

I had to use this book in a systematics class. The book is well organized and has a ton of information. The downside is even though this was recently published there are several orders/families that have changed and need updating. Although I can't fault the authors for these changes. Also the binding is very weakly glued and will come apart very easy. Mine is already coming apart in several places.

Great book!!! I recommend this necessary book for students, teachers and researchers who may study birds.Nicely illustrated and written!Besides it is not expensive for the large amount of data inside.

This book is so wonderful, I purchased it after I bought the Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals. Both of them are really informative, and have wonderful, full-color photography and drawings. A great comprehensive book for grown-ups and great for kids too! If you like this, you should check out the Mammals book also!

nice book but the cover was halve off when it arrived. after brief use cover came off completely. a small group of additional pages were in the book.

This is the exact same book as the Oxford-published version, just with a different cover, and is the same layout inside as the Mammals book. It is the same height as the Oxford books and just over half the thickness of the Mammals book.This is a really great book, inside there is a short introduction and then every family of bird, with 1 to 6 pages per family. A family with only one species, like Ostrich or Secretary bird, might have one or two pages and a family with 40 species might have 4 to 6 pages, with some writing and pictures describing a representative 2 to 6 species, with up to 20 of the other species listed. A list of 20 Latin names with no description attached probably isn't useful or interesting to very many people (not to me anyway), and I can't think why they did it (maybe somebody else knows), they did a similar thing in the Mammals book with bats and shrews.The information is interesting and well written. Some families have an extra 2-page spread about a certain interesting feature (like "how do pigeons find their way home") or species. The illustrations are very good. Since it doesn't have every species, and many of the ones it has are only listed, not described, this isn't exactly an identification guide, but having identified a bird you could look up it's genus or family in here to find out something interesting.My one major criticism, and the main reason why it is not as good as Mammals, is that it doesn't have a page or two at the beginning of each order or superorder. It's just a few pages for this family, a few pages for the next, nothing to let you know that all these families are grouped together in an order unless you check the "fact file" box for each of them. The introduction is also very short compared to Mammals. It seems that they got an author to write a section for each family, then stuck all the families together, no summary of the orders, not much introduction (no family-tree for instance).All in all, a very interesting collection of facts, but nothing more.