The ideal field guide would be one that is perfectly focused on your needs, with species selected exactly for the area where you spend your time and a helpful text that accurately describes those birds’ local range, seasonality, and habitat preferences. The most perfect realization of this is the personal company of a local expert. Failing that, we turn to books. Fortunately, there are lots of bird books out there, and therefore a correspondingly high potential for personalization and choice to make learning your local birds as smooth and enjoyable as possible, depending on your location, existing knowledge, and appetite for learning. If you are in Novato, Marin, or really anywhere in the Bay Area, these are the best available bird guides, ranked from simplest to most comprehensive.
If you decide to purchase any of these books, I encourage you to visit your local bookstore, or even better, your local wild bird or nature store. Like, ahem, mine. In addition to providing you with the product itself, your local bird store is one of your best and friendliest resources for help identifying an unknown bird.
If you want to learn the first 10-15 backyard species:
use this website
If you are ready to start learning the birds, why wait? Start with these articles right on this website:
- Backyard Birds I: Finches and Sparrows: A good chunk of the small birds on your seed feeders
- Backyard Birds II: The rest of my top 20 backyard birds
- Neighborhood Hawks: A bonus if you’d like to identify that hawk in your yard or neighborhood
Those articles include about 25 species, of which you probably have 10 or more passing through your yard this very day. Start with those. If you don’t have any other field guide and would like more pictures or sound recordings to use in conjunction with those articles, you can supplement with the species profiles on Cornell’s All About Birds website or in their free bird identification app called Merlin.
If you want to learn ~30-70 common neighborhood birds:
get an illustrated folding guide
If you are in the market for your first ever field guide to birds, I recommend starting with a simple fold-out guide to the backyard birds of our area. There are two good options available for our area: David Allen Sibley’s Backyard Birds of Northern California and John Muir Law’s Yard and Garden Birds of the San Francisco Bay Area (there are some other less good options as well, but you can trust me that these two are the best). Either of these guides illustrates around 70 species, all laid out for easy, at-a-glance comparison. At this stage, by sticking to common yard species, a visual search method works fine – just look at all the pictures until you see one that matches the bird in your yard – but it won’t work so well in a book with hundreds of pages. Once you’ve learned 50 birds or so from your folding guide, you will have a framework that will let you understand the arrangement of birds within the bigger books below.
If you regularly visit local ponds and wetlands in the winter, you may also want to complement your backyard guide with a similar folding waterbird guide: the same two artists produce two appropriate guides for this purpose, Sibley’s Birds of the California Coast and Jack Law’s Birds of the Sacramento Valley (both have a pretty good species selection for Marin/the Bay Area and focus on shorebirds and waterfowl).
If you want to learn all the common birds of our region (300-450 species):
get a Northern California book
Northern California is sufficiently well-stocked in bird life and in people who want to identify them that we have several good regional choices.
If you like words: Birds of Northern California by David Fix
This was my first bird book, and it served me well. The illustrations are generally adequate, but where this guide really excels is in its text. For people who like words, like me, this is nice: I believe there is real value to be obtained in reading a paragraph about a bird by a knowledgeable person. The paragraph might have some useful identification information, life history tidbits, or conservation stories – all ways of helping you to situate a bird in a context, making it an integrated and memorable part of how you experience the world, rather than just an image in a book. Then there’s also a plethora of practical info, including a comparison with similar species and good, California-scaled range maps.
If you like photos: Birds of Northern California by David Quady et al.
The current trend in field guides is increased use of photographs: in the digital age, there are ever more high-quality bird photos available for inexpensive compilation into different regional field guides. This is the best photographic guide yet to appear for our area, with crisp modern photos and a generous, info-packed text, albeit one that is more limited to just the facts and lacking the conversational readability of the Lone Pine book above.
If you like endearing drawings, compactness, and cheapness: Birds of Napa County
This is a pleasantly different option. Illustrated by renowned European bird illustrator Hermann Heinzel, who spent several months in Napa some years ago to compile this guide, this book has more individual character than any other options presented here. The birds are all presented in clever bits of habitat, exhibiting characteristic behaviors and poses, and generally doing things in a lively way that most technical illustrators seem to eschew in favor of uniform simplicity. The Napa focus means that the range maps are fairly useless to most people (they are breeding bird survey maps for Napa County only) and that ocean-going birds are excluded, but generally speaking the species selection is appropriate throughout the Bay Area. For frugal minimalists, this is also the smallest, lightest, and cheapest of the books presented here ($13 list price, but recently out of print, so we bought up the world’s remaining inventory and are selling it for $7 in our store).
If you want to learn all the birds here:
get a Western North America Guide
Unless you are a both a serious birder and a constant hopper-around the country, I see little reason to get a field guide to all of the birds of North America. There are many birds that don’t cross the Rockies, meaning that a full-country, 1000-species guide will have some 300 Eastern birds that function chiefly as confusing clutter. Admitting the practical truth of this, most of the major field guides now come in Western and Eastern versions to trim the species count to 700 or so. Compared to the regional guides in the section above, this will include essentially everything you will see throughout California, including uncommon species, ocean-going birds, mountain specialties, and most of our unusual sightings, which even when a bit out their normal range still belong to “the west” more often than to “the east.”
For most people, you don’t even necessarily need this level: the California books do give you 400 species or so, which is plenty for the average citizen. But if you’re in the rare ranks who need more, I’ll just recommend my favorite comprehensive guide: Sibley Birds West. David Allen Sibley is generally considered the the top bird artist of our time, the Audubon or Roger Tory Peterson of contemporary America. By having all illustrations done by one artist, you get a consistent and comprehensive set of paintings: all birds are shown in the same poses, including in flight, making comparisons easy. And these pictures are accurate: if something is different in the illustrations of two similar species, you can rely on that being a real difference between the two birds, something that is not always the case when dealing with less skillful illustrators, multi-artist projects, or photographs (where pose, lighting, or individual bird may not be perfectly representative)
Well done, once again – thanks, Jack!
New to the area and this is very helpful – I now know which birds I’m seeing at my feeders. 😀
Brilliant, thank you so much for these recommendations!