The American Southwest is famous for its dramatic vistas and the exotic animals and plants that inhabit the region. Along with Gila monsters, scorpions, and mountain goats, majestic birds, bring their own unique beauty to the area. California condors fight their way back from extinction in southern California’s remote Los Padres National Forest, roadrunners reside in the saguaro deserts west of Tucson, elegant trogons haunt Arizona’s Cave Creek Canyon, and drippers bob in cataracts of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Birds of the Southwest provides detailed information on identification, habitat preferences, voice, seasonal occurrence, and abundance of more than 450 species of birds found in the southwest deserts, coasts and mountains of Arizona, New Mexico, southern California and southern Nevada. Each species description is accompanied by a may showing the rand and distribution of that species , and color photographs aid in identification. In addition, directions are provided for more than four hundred localities where species can be found.

With its complete coverage of avian abundance and distribution in all habitats of the Southwest and its unique listing and description of major birding localities, including photographs of fifty sites, Birds of the Southwest will be an important reference for the beginner and the experienced birder alike.

John H. Rappole is a research scientist with the Conservation and Research Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park, Front Royal, Virginia. He is coauthor of Birds of Texas: A Field Guide also published by Texas A&M University Press, and has written several other volumes on bird identification and migration. W. L. Moody Jr. Natural History Series No. 30.