Fifty Common Birds of the Upper Midwest

by Dana Gardner (Illustrator), Nancy Overcott (Text by)

Overview

No bird is common, if we use “common” to mean ordinary. But birds that are seen more commonly than others can seem less noteworthy than species that are rarely glimpsed. In this gathering of essays and illustrations celebrating fifty of the most common birds of the Upper Midwest, illustrator Dana Gardner and writer Nancy Overcott encourage us to take a closer look at these familiar birds with renewed appreciation for their not-so-ordinary beauty and lifeways.Beginning with the garishly colored male and the more gently colored female wood duck, whose tree cavity nest serves as a launching pad for ducklings in the summer months, and ending on a bright yellow note with the American goldfinch, whose cheerful presence enlivens the midwestern landscape all year long, Overcott combines field observations drawn from her twenty-plus years of living and birding in Minnesota's Big Woods with anecdotes and data from other ornithologists to portray each species' life cycle, its vocalizations and appearance, and its habitat, food, and foraging methods as well as migration patterns and distribution. Infused with a dedication to conserving natural resources, her succinct yet personable prose forms an ideal complement to Gardner's watercolors as this renowned illustrator of avian life worldwide revisits the birds of his childhood. Together art and text ensure that the wild turkey, great blue heron, sharp-shinned hawk, barred owl, pileated woodpecker, house wren, ovenbird, field sparrow, rose-breasted grosbeak, red-winged blackbird, and forty other species of the Upper Midwest are never seen as common again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587296642
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	09/01/2007
Series:	Bur Oak Book
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	124
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Dana Gardner has illustrated more than twenty-six books, including, most recently, A Field Guide to the Birds of Belize. Nancy Overcott writes the “At Home in the Woods” column for the Fillmore County Journal. They are the coauthors of the laminated guide Birds at Your Feeder: A Guide to Winter Birds of the Great Plains (Iowa, 2003).

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction Wood Duck Ruffed Grouse Wild Turkey Great Blue Heron Turkey Vulture Bald Eagle Sharp-shinned Hawk Red-tailed Hawk American Kestral Killdeer American Woodcock Mourning Dove Black-billed Cuckoo Eastern Screech-Owl Barred Owl Whip-poor-will Ruby-throated Hummingbird Belted Kingfisher Red-bellied Woodpecker Downy Woodpecker Northern Flicker Pileated Woodpecker Eastern Phoebe Eastern Kingbird Red-eyed Vireo Blue Jay Tree Swallow Barn Swallow Black-capped Chickadee Tufted Titmouse White-breasted Nuthatch House Wren Ruby-crowned Kinglet Eastern Bluebird American Robin Gray Catbird Cedar Waxwing American Redstart Ovenbird Eastern Towhee Field Sparrow Song Sparrow White-throated Sparrow Northern Cardinal Rose-breasted Grosbeak Indigo Bunting Bobolink Red-winged Blackbird Baltimore Oriole American Goldfinch Recommended Reading Basic Field Guides to Birds Index