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Peterson Reference Guide
Peterson Reference Guide To Sparrows Of North America: A Field Guide to Sparrows, Towhees, and Juncos―Fascinating Stories, Science, and History
Sparrows are as complicated as they are common. This is an essential guide to identifying 76 kinds, along with a fascinating history of human interactions with them.
What exactly is a sparrow? All birders, and many non-birders, have essentially the same mental image of a pelican, a duck, or a flamingo, and a guide dedicated to waxwings or kingfishers would need nothing more than a sketch and a single sentence to satisfactorily identify its subject. Sparrows are harder to pin down. This book covers the birds of the family Passerellidae, which includes towhees, juncos, and dozens of other not necessarily small and not necessarily brown birds.
Birds have a human history, too, beginning with their significance to native cultures and continuing through their discovery by science, their taxonomic fortunes and misfortunes, and their prospects for survival in a world with ever less space for wild creatures. This book includes not just facts and measurements, but stories of the birds' entanglement with human history.
What exactly is a sparrow? All birders, and many non-birders, have essentially the same mental image of a pelican, a duck, or a flamingo, and a guide dedicated to waxwings or kingfishers would need nothing more than a sketch and a single sentence to satisfactorily identify its subject. Sparrows are harder to pin down. This book covers the birds of the family Passerellidae, which includes towhees, juncos, and dozens of other not necessarily small and not necessarily brown birds.
Birds have a human history, too, beginning with their significance to native cultures and continuing through their discovery by science, their taxonomic fortunes and misfortunes, and their prospects for survival in a world with ever less space for wild creatures. This book includes not just facts and measurements, but stories of the birds' entanglement with human history.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published March 19, 2019
28 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Rick Wright
5 books1 followerRick Wright leads birding and birds-and-art tours for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. A widely published writer and popular lecturer on subjects from sparrow identification to French hummingbird collectors, Wright spent nine years living and birding in Tucson with his wife, Alison Beringer. They now live in northern New Jersey—when, that is, they and their chocolate lab, Gellert, are unable to get away to their beloved southeast Arizona.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 11, 2023
You know what this book reminds me of? Recipe blogs. You go to the blog because you want to make a cake, but first the blogger must entertain you with pages and pages of quotes about the history of baking, quotes from their Mee-maw, unnecessarily long descriptions that you didn't ask for, and bland pictures that don't even properly show what they're making because the picture of this or that ingredient was more aesthetically pleasing.
Each bird entry stretches for pages. Normally I'd consider that a good thing but it's just because the author/editor couldn't cut unnecessary words or substitute in explanatory images. Birding history is scattered throughout. There are zero maps. If you want to know if this sparrow is likely to show up in your area, you need to read paragraphs worth of the author describing the range. Listen, knowing to look in conifers is useful. Including a detailed write up isn't a bad idea. Making me scan TWO pages worth of writing to see if that sparrow ever makes it to the Eastern hemisphere is cruel. JUST PUT MAPS IN YOUR BIRD BOOKS.
There are plentiful pictures but their usefulness varies. Consider the chipping sparrow - three pictures, all of them of the bird facing to the right. What's it look like from the front/back/at an angle? Dunno. In addition there are no quick and dirty descriptions - you have to be willing to sit with this book and basically read it front to back and frankly I found it neither interesting or pretty enough for that.
Let's continue with the chipping sparrow. Nearly two pages of geography descriptions. (No maps, remember!) Approximately one page of written description of the bird. One page of reminiscing about things like William Bertram's description of the bird. It seems like all the birds get big write ups but it's just unnecessary wordiness. That's this book in a nutshell. It even includes an extinct sparrow, with four dead pictures of dead birds. If it wanted to be a history book, that's fine, but making it both just created a too large book that does a poor job as both an identification guide and a history book.
If you want an identification guide: this ain't it. If you want a rather large, heavy hardback that provides some VERY THOROUGH history on ornithology, but in a scattershot way where you have to read through each sparrow to collect all the history, quite of bit of which is rather randomly chosen, this is the book for you. Honestly, I didn't enjoy it, it's too big to be either a guide book or a light read on history, I won't use it, the image quality is okay, and it arrived with a rumpled and torn dust cover. I'm doing something I basically never do: I'm returning it.
Each bird entry stretches for pages. Normally I'd consider that a good thing but it's just because the author/editor couldn't cut unnecessary words or substitute in explanatory images. Birding history is scattered throughout. There are zero maps. If you want to know if this sparrow is likely to show up in your area, you need to read paragraphs worth of the author describing the range. Listen, knowing to look in conifers is useful. Including a detailed write up isn't a bad idea. Making me scan TWO pages worth of writing to see if that sparrow ever makes it to the Eastern hemisphere is cruel. JUST PUT MAPS IN YOUR BIRD BOOKS.
There are plentiful pictures but their usefulness varies. Consider the chipping sparrow - three pictures, all of them of the bird facing to the right. What's it look like from the front/back/at an angle? Dunno. In addition there are no quick and dirty descriptions - you have to be willing to sit with this book and basically read it front to back and frankly I found it neither interesting or pretty enough for that.
Let's continue with the chipping sparrow. Nearly two pages of geography descriptions. (No maps, remember!) Approximately one page of written description of the bird. One page of reminiscing about things like William Bertram's description of the bird. It seems like all the birds get big write ups but it's just unnecessary wordiness. That's this book in a nutshell. It even includes an extinct sparrow, with four dead pictures of dead birds. If it wanted to be a history book, that's fine, but making it both just created a too large book that does a poor job as both an identification guide and a history book.
If you want an identification guide: this ain't it. If you want a rather large, heavy hardback that provides some VERY THOROUGH history on ornithology, but in a scattershot way where you have to read through each sparrow to collect all the history, quite of bit of which is rather randomly chosen, this is the book for you. Honestly, I didn't enjoy it, it's too big to be either a guide book or a light read on history, I won't use it, the image quality is okay, and it arrived with a rumpled and torn dust cover. I'm doing something I basically never do: I'm returning it.
October 24, 2025
This is probably the definitive work on sparrows, but it's actually more fascinating as a collection of ornithological stories than anything else.
To be clear, it's a reference volume and not a field guide, and while it might be unfair to dock it a star for not being the latter, it does seem odd to have a work this voluminous that misses a few key ingredients. Primarily, I'd like to see range maps for each species, as a quick sort of guide. Second, the included photos are incredible, but there's not enough variety within a species to feel like a full account. The written descriptions are great - if you actually study a bird, you'll come away with a good understanding of how to ID it, but even so, it would be nice to see pictures of juveniles, birds from other angles, etc.
So this one feels like...an essential reference volume, but not a book for a more casual birder (though you'll probably get your field guide needs from the Sibley app or something anyway).
To be clear, it's a reference volume and not a field guide, and while it might be unfair to dock it a star for not being the latter, it does seem odd to have a work this voluminous that misses a few key ingredients. Primarily, I'd like to see range maps for each species, as a quick sort of guide. Second, the included photos are incredible, but there's not enough variety within a species to feel like a full account. The written descriptions are great - if you actually study a bird, you'll come away with a good understanding of how to ID it, but even so, it would be nice to see pictures of juveniles, birds from other angles, etc.
So this one feels like...an essential reference volume, but not a book for a more casual birder (though you'll probably get your field guide needs from the Sibley app or something anyway).
May 5, 2024
sparrows sparrows and more sparrows.
All you ever wanted to know - yet not. There are a lot of anecdotes, but I was left wondering quite a few questions. The history of each bird is quite detailed, good descriptions (and good photographs) of individuals/species and subspecies and ranges. No maps, some behavioral points, and all of the americas - USA, Mexico, Canada, of course emphasis on E and W USA. A good addition to standard guide books - especially as sparrows are notoriously difficult to differentiate. And appear to always have been!
All you ever wanted to know - yet not. There are a lot of anecdotes, but I was left wondering quite a few questions. The history of each bird is quite detailed, good descriptions (and good photographs) of individuals/species and subspecies and ranges. No maps, some behavioral points, and all of the americas - USA, Mexico, Canada, of course emphasis on E and W USA. A good addition to standard guide books - especially as sparrows are notoriously difficult to differentiate. And appear to always have been!
April 15, 2020
Beautiful book! Full of so much information, I have no doubt I'll refer back to it often!
July 24, 2020
Some really interesting information. But to really help me with sparrow ID I need to have far more photos, range maps, diagrams pointing out field Mark's. Maybe even paintings to show differences
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews