<div>Beyond Audubon: A quirky, &ldquo;lively and illuminating&rdquo; account of bird-watching&rsquo;s history, including &ldquo;rivalries, controversies, [and] bad behavior&rdquo; (The Washington Post Book World). From the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds&mdash;great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly colored songbirds. Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American birding: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between border skirmishes; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a convicted blackmailer) and the endlessly self-mythologizing John James Audubon. Naturalist Scott Weidensaul also recounts the explosive growth of modern birding that began when an awkward schoolteacher named Roger Tory Peterson published A Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. Today, birding counts iPod-wearing teens and obsessive &ldquo;listers&rdquo; among its tens of millions of participants, making what was once an eccentric hobby into something so completely mainstream it&rsquo;s now (almost) cool. This compulsively readable popular history will surely find a roost on every birder&rsquo;s shelf. &ldquo;Weidensaul is a charming guide. . . . You don&rsquo;t have to be a birder to enjoy this look at one of today&rsquo;s fastest-growing (and increasingly competitive) hobbies.&rdquo; &mdash;The Arizona Republic</div>

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Of a Feather

<div>David Sibley, Don and Lillian Stokes, and many more share their inside tips&mdash;and witty observations&mdash;on the birding life. The biggest names in birding dispense advice to birders of every level&mdash;on topics ranging from feeding birds and cleaning binoculars to pishing and pelagic birding&mdash;in these lighthearted essays accompanied by illustrations. Whether satirizing bird snobs or relating the traditions and taboos of the birding culture, this collection of wisdom is as chock-full of helpful information as it is entertaining. &ldquo;The book is a delight to read and will generate new enthusiasm for the hobby. The 25 black-and-white line drawings are hilarious.&rdquo; &mdash;Booklist</div>

Good Birders Don't Wear White

<div>&ldquo;Excitement abounds in Scott Weidensaul&rsquo;s detailed history of the first clashes between European settlers and Native Americans on the East Coast.&rdquo;&mdash;Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier&mdash;the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans. Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground&mdash;when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land. The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories&mdash;like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America&rsquo;s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings. &ldquo;Exciting and revealing . . . a stirring panorama of the land and the peoples who made their mark on it from the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries . . . This is a rich tableau that both excites and informs about the forging of early American society.&rdquo;&mdash;Booklist &ldquo;Weidensaul&rsquo;s delightful storytelling brings to life the terrors and hopes of the earliest days of America.&rdquo;&mdash;Publishers Weekly</div>

The First Frontier

<div>In 1953, birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on what became a legendary journey-a one hundred day trek over 30,000 miles around North America. They traveled from Newfoundland to Florida, deep into the heart of Mexico, through the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and into Alaska's Pribilof Islands. Two years later, Wild America, their classic account of the trip, was published. On the eve of that book's fiftieth anniversary, naturalist Scott Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher's steps to tell the story of wild America today. How has the continent's natural landscape changed over the past fifty years? How have the wildlife, the rivers, and the rugged, untouched terrain fared? The journey takes Weidensaul to the coastal communities of Newfoundland, where he examines the devastating impact of the Atlantic cod fishery's collapse on the ecosystem; to Florida, where he charts the virtual extinction of the great wading bird colonies that Peterson and Fisher once documented; to the Mexican tropics of Xilitla, which have become a growing center of ecotourism since Fisher and Peterson's exposition. And perhaps most surprising of all, Weidensaul finds that much of what Peterson and Fisher discovered remains untouched by the industrial developments of the last fifty years. Poised to become a classic in its own right, Return to Wild America is a sweeping survey of the natural soul of North America today.</div>

Scott Weidensaul
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Books By Scott Weidensaul (3 Books)

Of a Feather

The First Frontier

Return to Wild America

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