Rating: 
Summary: Great potential but bad design
Review: Field guides are great to have because they're small and their entire aim is to help you immediately identify a bird you see before you. Every birder should have at least one field guide, and maybe even several - some to keep in the car or by a window.Being published by the National Audubon Society, you'd expect this field guide to be top-notch, one developed and tested by thousands of birders. Indeed, the photos are very nice, full color and in 'native habitat'. The descriptions are pretty complete - with size, key things to look for, song, hapitat. There's a little map showing range, and the range is also described as well. The problem is with the layout. All of the pictures are at the front of the book - put into groups by bird type, three to a page. Often there's only one photo of a bird, even though they look different during different years of life or seasons. If you see something that seems it might be right, now you have to go flipping through many pages to track down the actual *information* on that bird. Does it even live where you're looking? Are there other similar birds it might be instead? What are those key features you're supposed to be watching for? By the time you figure any of this out, the bird is probably back in hiding. It seems with their knowledge of birders and how birders operate, they'd have arranged this book in an easier-to-use fashion. While this is a nice book to have for its lovely pictures, it's not what I grab when I need to bring a field book with me on a trip.
Rating: 
Summary: The Best of It's Kind
Review: For amateur bird-identification, this is clearly the best book of its kind. The photographs are clear and vivid, and capture many birds in natural settings, showing them doing things that they actually do. For identification, this helps, as you get a sense of what kind of place you're likely to see the bird. For example, the pictures of the thrushes clearly indicate that they are deep-woods birds. The text descriptions of wonderful, offering detailed information about physical appearance, egg size and number, breeding season, male/female physical differences, migration pattern, and food preferences. One of the most useful descriptions is of the birds' songs. In addition to these "technical" data, every bird has a section of general description where the editors include comments on behavior (for example, telling you how friendly chickadees can be), their history, environmental factors, and the bird's relationship to humans. Sometimes, the editors are a little too human-oriented in their descriptions. For example, the book accurately describes European Starlings as pests, and mentions that starlings ended up in America because people brought them here from Europe. However, the book loses a golden opportunity to make a comment on the ignorance of introduced species. Likewise, in the description of the Common Crow, the editors mention how they are more numerous now than when settlers first arrived in the United States. However, they fail to explain that there is a connection between human actvity and the rise in crow populations. This criticism aside, the text descriptions offer some great insights into the lives of the birds, and allows you to see your backyard visitors, or those deep-woods residents, in a whole new light. Anyone who has even a little interest in birds should have this book on hand.
Rating:
Summary: The Best of It's Kind
Review: For amateur bird-identification, this is clearly the best book of its kind. The photographs are clear and vivid, and capture many birds in natural settings, showing them doing things that they actually do. For identification, this helps, as you get a sense of what kind of place you're likely to see the bird. For example, the pictures of the thrushes clearly indicate that they are deep-woods birds. The text descriptions of wonderful, offering detailed information about physical appearance, egg size and number, breeding season, male/female physical differences, migration pattern, and food preferences. One of the most useful descriptions is of the birds' songs. In addition to these "technical" data, every bird has a section of general description where the editors include comments on behavior (for example, telling you how friendly chickadees can be), their history, environmental factors, and the bird's relationship to humans. Sometimes, the editors are a little too human-oriented in their descriptions. For example, the book accurately describes European Starlings as pests, and mentions that starlings ended up in America because people brought them here from Europe. However, the book loses a golden opportunity to make a comment on the ignorance of introduced species. Likewise, in the description of the Common Crow, the editors mention how they are more numerous now than when settlers first arrived in the United States. However, they fail to explain that there is a connection between human actvity and the rise in crow populations. This criticism aside, the text descriptions offer some great insights into the lives of the birds, and allows you to see your backyard visitors, or those deep-woods residents, in a whole new light. Anyone who has even a little interest in birds should have this book on hand.
Rating:
Summary: Good Pictures, Info; Poor Organization
Review: I have used many of Audubon's Field Guides, and they are very helpful and usually organized and easy to understand. However, this one is extremely complex and confusing. When I find an interesting bird, I would go grab my binoculars and field guide and look it up. I go to the correct catagory and frantically search for the bird. When I find it, it gives me a detailed color picture that helps identify the bird. However, if you want more information, it than refers you to a different page, hundreds of thin pages away. You than need to go and find the page, but by then, the bird is gone. When I do get to the page, it is filled with wonderful detailed information of appearance, voice, habitat, nesting, range, map of habitat, and a brief summary. The book is nice, but I would recommend buying another one with more organization.
Rating:
Summary: Who thought of this annoying design for a bird book???!!!???
Review: I've got lots of bird guides, books, etc. Although I already have a lot of books, I thought it was time to get an Audubon book. Don't get me wrong - the pictures are OUTSTANDING. It is just an annoying setup with all the pictures in the front and the bird information in the back, causing you to have to flip back and forth to identify a bird. They need to fix this design in the next edition. It has a lot of great info in the bird description section. But, when I go out looking for birds, I leave this one at home.
Rating: 
Summary: Recommended
Review: I've got this edition and an older addition. Excellant information and great live photos of the different birds of Eastern North America. Would rather prefer a birding guide with the text with the photo on the same page though. But that aside, this is recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great Informative Book for Birdwatching
Review: It was really good. Although lengthy, it told a lot about what bird you were looking at.
Rating:
Summary: I love this guide!
Review: The only way this book could be improved would be if audio were added for the bird call. I have two other Audobon Guides and plan to add more to my collection.
Rating:
Summary: good photos, but...
Review: The photographs are excellent, and at least Audubon no longer tries to list birds by habitat (a highly frustrating and unproductive scheme). But the plain fact is that no set of photographs, however carefully done, can every make as good a field guide as good paintings can. Go with Peterson or NGS every time!
Rating: 
Summary: Incomplete and inconvenient
Review: This book, although had good intentions is a very inefficient and incomplete field guide. It only has pictures of some of the birds, and usually only one plumage, which makes it impossible as a reliable field guide for fall shorebirds and warblers, and juvenile birds. The pictures of the birds are also seperate from the descriptions and range maps. In addition the pictures are organized by color rather that family. So, if you know you are looking at a warbler you can't go to the warbler section you must find the section of the pictures that has e.g. birds with yellow plumage. Pictures of birds in flight are all but absent in this guide, so if you don't know your hawks, etc. you won't be any better off with this book. I would recommend a more complete and easy to use guide like the National Geographic field guide.
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