Peterson Field Guide: Eastern Birds' Nests

The guide is organized taxonomically, and each nest gets one small picture taken from the top down. This essentially means that if you don’t have a pretty short list of likely candidates, and if you only get a view of the nest from below or the side, your chances of ID’ing a species from the nest shape browsing through this book are slim. A better approach would have been to organize nests by location, structure and materials, and for tree nests to include at least two images one from the side or below, and one from above.

Best field guide to birds' nests in the world. The only shortcoming is that all the nests are photographed from directly above, presumably to show the eggs as well. Unfortunately many nests are viewed from below or the side, and pics of these perspectives would be helpful. The text is often colorful and personal as well as informative; it fills in some of the gaps left by the photos. Highly recommend it. You'll use it a lot the first couple of breeding seasons, less so as you beome familiar with the nests.

I bought this book as I work at a nature reserve and would occasionally come across nests and wonder what bird made them. This book soon solved the problem!It is a fairly recent update of a classic Peterson guide although having seen the original, the plates and text haven't actually changed very much (photos a little brighter perhaps, and stronger paper).The format is very simple with each species having its own page. This page contains a colour plate of a typical nest with eggs, then a written description of a typical nest site (habitat, type of tree the nest is usually found in, nest materials etc) and nest height, plus the appearance of the eggs and their average size and number. There is also a paragraph on the species' nesting range and sometimes a snippet of interesting information (these little tid-bits make interesting reading, usually referring to a species peculiar nesting habits or unusual examples of nesting). I like to have this book in the field as a reference because it is small and slim and fits easily into a back pack but I also enjoy just dipping into it at home when I see a particular (regardless of whether I find its nest or not).It's a really sweet book and not very expensive, and I think many people would enjoy having this on their shelves for reference as well as general reading. Highly recommended!

Beautiful pictures with a lot of info about nesting habits, typical site for species' nests, broods per year, size of nests, broods, eggs, etc. Fun to just sit & look thru the book. The nests are presented in the order that's traditional for most bird guides, but it's not an identity guide for adult birds. Each page does have a sketch of the the adult bird, but the focus is the nest, so you need a separate field guide for bird identity.If I could add anything, it would be a section about human etiquette regarding nest observation.

I try to see the best in everything so here goes. I was disappointed in this book - I was looking for a book that clearly showed nests, ie., what they look like in a tree, etc. All of the very clear photos, with the exception of one, show the nest from the top. The view is lokking in to the nest and all of the nests have eggs in them. It is almost as if the nests are secondary. The accompanying text is descriptive and the photos are good but this book should be called Eastern Birds' Eggs.

This book contains wonderful photos of nests and eggs for birds found in the Eastern part of the US. If you've ever found a piece of a bird's egg on the ground and wondered what kind of bird it came from, this book can certainly help determine that. In addition to the wonderful color photos, there are notes about the various birds and their nesting habits. This is an attractive, informative book that I would recommend to all bird and nature lovers.

"Eastern Birds Nests" by Hal H. Harrison (Peterson Field Guides) is a very, very good field guide... and that is exactly what it is intended to be. Besides good photography and straight-forward descriptions this guide contains concise "Notes" segments in each entry that add a LOT of good information/observation for the reader. It is not a textbook. It is for the thirty or forty million people who want very valuable, applicable working knowledge and prefer to spend five hours a week in the field rather than in a classroom.

I was giving a class on monitoring bluebird boxes and I needed to show people the nests of predators and other birds that use the bluebird boxes. I wanted people to be able to see the difference between the nests built by bluebirds as compared to house sparrows, for instance. Also, I needed to show the different colors of eggs.This book was absolutely essential for this. Once examining the photos in the book and reading the text, people were easily able to identify the different kinds of nests that had been built in the boxes we were monitoring.

Super reference book, great photos, loads of information on each species of birds eggs and nest as well as nesting habits. Highly recommend.

what a privilege, to be able to peek into a nest .. .

Specialised!

Great material, durable.

Good guide.