Waterfowl in Your Pocket

A Guide to Water Birds of the Midwest

By Dana Gardner

Bur Oak Guides

laminated fold-out guide, 180 watercolor illustrations, 2008
16 3/4 x 16 7/8 inches folds to 4 1/8 x 9 inches
$9.95, 1-58729-683-7, 978-1-58729-683-3
$99.00, 10-pack point-of-purchase display, 1-58729-684-5, 978-1-58729-684-0

Waterfowl in Your Pocket is a welcome aid to identifying the many colorful and intriguing water birds of the midwestern states, from the Great Lakes west to the Dakotas, east to Ohio, and south to Kansas and Missouri. Illustrator Dana Gardner has created fourteen panels showing fifty-one species of ducks, geese, swans, grebes, pelicans, coots, cormorants, moorhens, and loons swimming and flying with complete plumage variations—dark phases, light phases, and juvenile and adult male and female forms in summer and winter. The text also includes length, common and scientific names, and frequency and distribution.

Whether flying high overhead in the fall or swimming in a nearby lake in the summer, waterfowl are notoriously difficult to identify, and Gardner has worked hard to make this guide useful for beginning birders as well as those more experienced in the field. Keep binoculars and Waterfowl in Your Pocket in your car or backpack—or pocket!—during spring and fall migration and summer nesting season for help in identifying such captivating water birds as greater white-fronted geese and tundra swans during spring and fall migration, male wood ducks and mallards in breeding plumage, immature and female red-breasted mergansers and snow geese, and uncommon winter visitors such as eiders and scoters.

Dana Gardner has illustrated more than twenty-six books, including most recently A Field Guide to the Birds of Belize. Author of Raptors in Your Pocket: A Guide to Great Plains Birds of Prey (Iowa, 2006), he is the coauthor with Nancy Overcott of Fifty Common Birds of the Upper Midwest (Iowa, 2006) and Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest (Iowa, 2007) as well as Birds at Your Feeder: A Guide to Winter Birds of the Great Plains (Iowa, 2003).

Nature