Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Book Club

Now that a new school year has started, the Guilt-Free, Gilt-Free Bird Book Club is gearing up for a new year, too. This season we’ll be meeting at Pepper McGregor’s coffee shop on Superior Street in the Lakeside neighborhood of Duluth at 6 pm on the third Thursdays of each month, starting this week on October 16th. For our first discussion, we’ll be reading the new book, “Pete Dunne on Bird Watching: The How-to, Where-to, and When-to of Birding.”

Pete Dunne is the popular writer of such important books as Hawks in Flight, The Wind Masters, The Feather Quest, and Tales of a Low-Rent Birder. He’s vice president of the New Jersey Audubon Society and director of its Cape May Bird Observatory, and has not only written seven books, he’s also a columnist for several birding magazines. In this new book, Pete provides a user-friendly guide to birding, sharing a lot of his own experiences to get people new to birding grounded and having fun right from the start. Do you want to know how to go about buying binoculars or a field guide? Pete Dunne and his consultants give sound advice on what to look for and how to choose among the many choices available today in a large chapter about the tools of the trade. Other topics he deals with in equal depth are about backyard birding and bird feeding, the fundamentals of bird finding and identification, networking with other birders, and the ethics and responsibilities of birders.

Pete is extremely knowledgeable—he’s one of the most respected birders in the country. But he’s also a wonderful writer, his pen overflowing with cleverness and good humor. The Wall Street Journal calls him the “bard of birding” with good reason. His enthusiasm for birds is contagious, and his story-telling ability is legendary. For years when I talk about hawks I’ve been using a hilarious Pete Dunne story to talk about how we identify birds and can sometimes tell whether they’re male or female by their plumage, and Pete finally has that story in a book. And even though I’ve told the story myself at least two or three hundred times over the years, reading Pete’s version in the book still made me laugh out loud.

So Pete Dunne on Bird Watching is both a great read and a very informative book, worth your time whether you can come to our Guilt-Free Gilt Free Bird Book Club or not. At the book club meeting, we’ll discuss the book and share our own ideas for birding how-tos. And if you haven’t had a chance to finish the book yet, or even to start it, we promise we won’t make you feel guilty. So come on over to Pepper McGregor’s this Thursday at 6 for a fun evening of conversation and camaraderie.