|
| Field Guide to Owls of California and the West (California Natural History Guides) | 
| Author: Hans J. Peeters
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $7.52
You Save: $12.43 (62%)
New (28) from $7.52
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 562175
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 346
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0520252802
Dewey Decimal Number: 598.97
EAN: 9780520252806
ASIN: 0520252802
Publication Date: October 9, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New; Excellent condition! Clean crisp tight copy, no marks,could have some minor shelf wear. Email Notification, Satisfaction Guaranteed,Direct from our warehouse.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Most owls are almost perfectly adapted to life in the dark. Their vaguely humanoid faces reflect the spectacular evolution of their hearing and vision, which has made flight, romance, and predation possible in the near absence of light. This accessible guide, full of intriguing anecdotes, covers all 19 species of owls occurring in North America. More than an identification guide, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West describes the biology and behavior of owls to make finding and identifying them easier and watching them more enjoyable. The guide also explores the conservation challenges that owls face and tells how owls provide insights to scientists working in fields from technology to health.
* Color plates illustrate each species
* Range maps show the western distribution of North America's owls, 14 of which occur in California
* Offers tips for finding and watching owls
* Gives information on how to design, place, and maintain nest boxes
* Describes human attitudes toward owls through history, including in Native American cultures of the West
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Another superb book from Hans Peeters! December 9, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Far more than a Field Guide to the Owls of California and the West, this wonderful book is a primer in ornithology, a work of strong scholarship, a guide to conservation, and an entertainment. Mr. Peeters is a distinguished raptor biologist, a bird painter and illustrator, a naturalist of extraordinary experience. Beyond providing astute identification information, this book gives the reader fascinating detail on the lives of owls, the ecology of birds in general and raptors in particular, and does these things with a grace of language unknown in other field guides.
Peeters has done it all -text, photographs, drawings, and illustrations. The plates are among his very best. The photograph of a Northern Pygmy Owl that introduces the scction describing an owl's body is extraordinary, and there are many more of similar beauty and utility. The book is presented in six parts. The Introduction is followed by An Owl's Life, Finding and Watching Owls, Owls and Humans, Species Accounts, and 21 stunning color plates (including two very useful ones of fledgling owls).
The book does indeed go beyond the boundaries of California. In fact, all 19 species of owls fond in the United States are covered. As the author says, "...the new scope provided the opportuniry to write about species that don't occur in my home state but that I have had the pleasure of meeting elsewhere."
Mr. Peeters (who is much published in professional circles)has done a thorough survey of the scientific literature, and what he has found and shares with his readers is interesting in every way. Details of distribution, food habits, behavior, ecology and status are provided. And all of this is supplemented with the more than half century of perceptive global natural history observations that have been so much of the life of this biologist. The book is full of material dazzling to amateur and professional alike.
This is a field guide that can be read for pleasure, written as it is with color and verbal richness laced with the idiosyncratic humor of this author.
This book would make a fine gift for birders young and old (perhaps especially if coupled with his recent Raptors of California, co-authored by his wife, Pam Peeters). But the same is true for the professional ornithologist -who is bound to learn how little he or she knew about owls before reading this book!
A wonderful book for the owl enthusiast! December 6, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book does not claim to be a scientific manual about owls. And just because it's published by a University Press doesn't mean it has to be a text book. It is a field guide. Field guides are not required to be written by biologists. The person who wrote the review called "Where's the beef?" is also NOT a biologist and is also quite fond of relating natural history information about raptors based solely on personal experience and antecdotes. So let's just put all that aside, shall we? If you love owls, if you want to know more about them, and their habitats, and their personal lives, and how to look for them, and how to observe them, then this is a wonderful book. If you want a lot of scientific details and facts - most of which will be based on what I would consider to be unethical experimentation on captive owls - then it's best to buy a biology book about owls that is written by a Ph.D. Otherwise, you will enjoy the accessible writing style of this book, the humor, and the photographs and drawings. You will learn more about owls, fascinating creatures that they are!
 Where's the Beef? December 6, 2007
2 out of 13 found this review helpful
Usually a natural history book by a major university press is written by a research biologist with personal expertise in the science of the subject at hand. For instance, Dr. James Duncan wrote a very good book on owls of the world and their biology and conservation, and Dr. Duncan is a renowed Canadian owl biologist working on field studies of multiple species. Robert Nero wrote the monograph on the great gray owl, and is an acknowledged expert on that species.
In contrast, Hans Peeters is a retired community college teacher who does no research, but is an avid birdwatcher and a very good painter. Apparently he has great personal connections that led to his invitation to write such a book. Amazingly, many of the endorsements of the book are by fellow birdwatchers such as Clay Sutton and Allen Fish and not by owl experts. Presumably the material for the book was gleaned from literature searches, limited personal experience of the author while walking on his 1 1/2 acre wooded property (or other places), plus personal communications from the author to experts such as Pete Bloom in order to obtain material for the book.
Since the author is indisputedly a highly intelligent man and well-connected, he could produce a generally coherent, accurate book that is readable and enjoyable, but not with the depth of a real expert. Thus, to fill in the book, which was supposed to be about owls of California, he had to expand to owls of the West, albeit somewhat haphazardly and superficially. But in reality, one finds mention of owls of everywhere from Indiana to Malaysia, including photos of non-indigenous owls in a book about California owls. This would only happen in such a book with such an author. To fill in the book, also we find essentially irrelevant information to stretch out superficial discussions, such as a very minimal discussion of owl migration and dispersal with comments on the use of solar-powered satellite telemetry to study the diurnal raptor, the peregrine falcon, which as nothing to do with owl migration and its research, but just happens to be something known to the author and is a way of the author recognizing one of his friends who studies peregrine falcons but not owls.
So, yes, you can read clever commentaries about owls seeming like samurai. And you can get good information as a birdwatcher on how to tell owls apart and how to find them in the field and all sorts of information on the biology of owls that a decent literature search would reveal.
You won't learn that burrowing owls were recommended for endangered species protections by essentially all the state's major burrowing owl biologists, but that the state overturned those biology-based recommendations under pressure from industries including agriculture, building trades and land developers. You won't even see mention of an interesting early citation from the author's own mentor, Ned Johnson, on the migratory status of flammulated owls.
There is nothing wrong with this book, but it is not all that it could be. It lacks the perspective of a real owl researcher. Owl mobbing could have been better explained by a researcher who uses a typical technique to trap raptors, the use of a live great horned owl with dho-gaza, which incites mobbing and reveals behaviors of all sorts of fauna that would have been revealing in a book of this sort. Researchers who trap owls using live bait would have had insights about whether diurnal owls need to cast a pellet before they attempt to feed. Instead, the author relies on discussions of captive owls and even captive diurnal raptors whose habits are often related to the scheduling established for them by their human handlers and which may or may not relate to the lives of wild birds.
So, this is an enjoyable book, well written, but not a deep book. It is a bird watchers book, not a product of deep research on even one species.
There are some good photos and some decent drawings in the book. Many of the photos and drawings seem to represent captive or young owls that are easy to manipulate for such purposes.
This book is a delicious chocolate milkshake. If you want a real beef hamburger, you need to go elsewhere.
Stan Moore
Fairfax Raptor Research
San Geronimo, CA
wonderful pocket guide to western north american owls November 2, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The size of a Peterson series field guide but perhaps a bit thicker. Covers everything one might want to know about the owls of our West. Detailed and very readable descriptions of their biology, habits, how to find them and their interaction with humans. Next is an excellent species account with wonderful color illustations and photos of owls in action and as field guide representatives. Comprehensive, incisive and beautifully put together -- a real buy!
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
