Kenn Kaufman's book Birds of North America in an excellent field guide for birders of all levels to use in identifying birds. This 384 page book is a comprehensive guide of North American birds that is small enough to be easily carried into the field.
Kaufman uses over 2000 digitally enhanced photographs to illustrate birds, showing multiple pictures for species with differences in males, females and juveniles and birds in flight for birds commonly identified by their shape in flight.
The book is organized by logically grouping similar types of birds together. Some examples: birds of prey, shorebirds, and wading birds. These groupings make it easy for birders at all levels to find a particular bird in the book, especially birders who are not familiar with the taxonomical groupings. Each section has an excellent two page introduction that further breaks down the group into subgroups, including pictures from each to help make identification that much quicker and easier.
Kenn's descriptions and pictures do an very good job of pointing out distinguishing characteristics of each bird. Arrows on many of the pictures point to key identifying marks on a bird. The paragraph description is fairly short for each bird. Details on making a proper identification are very good, but beyond that, the information provided about an individual bird is fairly limited.
The nine page introduction does a pretty good job of giving a general overview of birding and Kenn does a good job of keeping things simple, especially with identifying key features on a bird and what to look for on unfamiliar birds. Some information is provided about related topics like where to look for birds, binoculars, and feeding birds but none in great detail. A little more information on some of these topics might have been nice.
Overall, Birds of of North America does a very good job of making identification of birds as easy as possible while being a comprehensive guide to identifying birds of North America. Birders of all levels can benefit from this book.
--Bob Norris--