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Hot off the Press! A Birder’s Guide to Minnesota

This truly comprehensive Minnesota birding guide is a must for every birder and bird photographer visiting the state. It is a county-by-county guide to over 1400 birding locations and lavishly illustrated with over 180 color bird photos and nearly 100 detailed maps. An exhaustive annotated list to all 447 of Minnesota’s bird species even contains valuable field identification tips. It is easy to use and just by scanning one of the many QR codes you can access maps of specific birding locations.

—Comprehensive bird-finding guide to all 87 counties

—Completely revised Fifth Edition

—Over 1,400 locations highlighted

—Annotated List of Minnesota’s 447 bird species

—Identification tips for the trickiest field problems

—Color photos of 170 of the state’s most iconic bird species

—QR codes link directly to detailed location maps

—Checklists for Minnesota’s “non-bird” wildlife

—Seasonal maps for the best birding sites by region

—Online database with updates to keep this guide current

PURCHASE IT HERE

Author Bio:

“Kim Eckert’s interest in birding was sparked in the Chicago area during a 10th-grade biology class – the only biology course he would ever take. He became an English major at St. John’s University in Minnesota and then taught English (with some first-year French on the side) during the 1970s. But he turned to a career in birding after moving to Duluth, Minnesota in 1977, where he served as Naturalist at Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve (for a total of 20 years), taught bird identification classes for a decade, and started leading birding tours (including 30 years with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours). In 1986, he created the Minnesota Birding Weekends & Weeks program of tours throughout Minnesota and elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada, which is now in its 37th season. In addition, Kim has written numerous articles for The Loon and other publications, plus Birding By Hindsight, a compilation of The Loon’s series of 70 bird ID articles, and four previous editions of A Birder’s Guide to Minnesota.

After 45 years, he still lives in Duluth…where he muses about the Great Plains, prefers not to take anything too seriously, finds joy in not knowing where he is going, reminisces about the times with Bob and Panda…and thinks about things.”

A Birder’s Guide to Minnesota

A County-by-County Guide to Over 1400 Birding Locations

5th Edition

978-1-7353499-1-6

wire-O binding

$34.95 Retail

($17.47 wholesale)

8×10 inches

472 pages

full color with photos

Author: Kim Richard Eckert

PURCHASE IT HERE

November 22, 2022

Sparky Stensaas

A Butterfly Big Year: Mariposa Road

If you’re looking for a summer book to read at the beach (or in the photo blind), then I’ve got a goody for you. Robert Michael Pyle’s Mariposa Road is a hybrid between Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. The subtitle says it all…“The First Butterfly Big Year.” And I am a sucker for Big Year books!

If you’re not familiar with the concept, a “Big Year” is a quest to see as many species in North America as possible in one calendar year…almost always this means birds. In fact the recent Steve Martin/Jack Black/Owen Wilson movie was about just that, “The Big Year.” But Pyle wanted to do the first official Butterfly Big Year.

Robert Michael Pyle is a legend among naturalists…as an author, and as a conservationist…Yale-trained and Guggenheim “fellowed,” he also founded the Xerces Society, an organization dedicated to invertebrate conservation. He also wrote one of the first butterfly field guides…and the classic books Chasing Monarchs and Where Bigfoot Walks.

So I was more than thrilled when he came to Duluth last winter to speak and do a book signing at Hartley Nature Center. The room was packed and he did not disappoint. The man is also a dead-ringer for the off-season Santa Claus…big belly, big white beard and booming voice.

His trusty steed for this noble quest was his 1982 Honda Civic, a vehicle he lovingly referred to as “Powdermilk.” He took the back seat and the front passenger seat out, replacing them with a sleeping cot. And Powdermilk was faithful, carrying Bob 40,533 miles criss-crossing the continent. Shunning hotels and fast food, he camped roadside. One of the most interesting aspects to this book is his ability to meet and converse with strangers of all kinds

His only Minnesota venture involved crawling through a snow-dusted and frozen Cedar Creek bog vainly searching for Bog Copper eggs (eggs count!…as do caterpillars)

Pyle’s quest also raised $46,000 for conservation. A noble cause.

My only real complaint with the book is that he only uses Latin names in the text…This means I spent a lot of time looking up species in the Kaufman Guide that I kept handy. Also there is no Index 🙁

Just for fun, I perused the appendices for the species he MISSED during his Big Year (After all, a human can only be in one place at one time, so inevitably some species were understandably missed). Here are a few that I have been fortunate to see and photograph, that Pyle missed.

Jutta Arctic (Oeneis jutta) Black Spruce bog in the Ditchbanks, Carlton County MN