Finding the right guide to the birds

Picking a birding field guide is a little like picking a spouse, writes Sue Horton, a Times' editor of the California section and internally-known bird enthusiast.

In her review of two birding field guides in Sunday's Book Review section, Horton plucks the good and bad she spots in the "Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America" and "Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America":

My field guide and I have been very happy in the eight years we've been together. David Allen Sibley's "The Sibley Guide to Birds" came out right about the time I got serious about birding, and we've been together ever since. But that doesn't mean I've lost my eye for other books.

Long before Sibley, there was Roger Tory Peterson, the great man of 20th century birding. For decades, his field guides ("Western Birds" and "Birds of Eastern and Central North America") were a required purchase for anyone serious about birds.

For my money, however, they had two major flaws: First, there was no single guide to all U.S. birds, and since birds sometimes show up where they're not expected, it's nice to have all the North American species in a single volume.

"Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America," published 12 years after his death, combines the two previous guides into one, and has gone some way toward solving the map problem, putting tiny maps on the pages where the birds appear.

Even more appealing is the "Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America." The guide uses photos rather than paintings, which has not always worked well in other guides. The book comes with a DVD of songs and calls for 138 species. Being able to call up songs in the field on your iPod is great.

--Francisco Vara-Orta

Photo: Brian E. Small

At 74, primate expert Jane Goodall still doing good works

Although she has more than a half-century under her belt, renowned primatologist Jane Goodall doesn't show any signs of slowing down anytime soon. The 74-year-old is still traveling the world doing acts of environmental good and is working on a new book.

Over the last 22 years, Goodall has traveled tirelessly, staying no more than three weeks in one place as she tries to educate Earth's top primates about environmentalism, inspire hope and get them to save their planet, The Times' Tami Abdollah writes in a Q&A in today's Calendar section:

Abdollah: Is your work still centered around or focused on chimpanzees?

Goodall: Not really. It's very, very important to me that we continue to study, that we do it in the right way, that there's enough money for it, that we try to protect those chimpanzees into the future by working with all the people living in poverty around the park and then hoping more and more of them will enable part of the land to regenerate so the chimps are no longer trapped as they are now; they're surrounded by cultivated fields. In five years, you get a 30-foot tree. So they're coming back, but you know, the villagers if they wanted could cut them down, there's nothing to stop them, except goodwill.

In the photo above, Goodall helps students plant a tree at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice at the University of San Diego.

-- Francisco Vara-Orta

Photo: Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times

Chronicling the caribou-vs.-oil controversy

A wildlife biologist spent part of 2003 observing a migrating of a herd of caribou in the Alaskan wilderness. The biologist, Karsten Heuer, has now turned her experiences into a  book, "Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot With an Arctic Herd."

In "Being Caribou" (Milkweed Editions: 240 pp., $15 paper), Heuer makes a case against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with a gripping, cinematic tale of following the refuge's herd of 120,000 bulls, cows and just-born calves on a 900-mile migration across the tundra.

Kristina Lindgren, an assistant editor in Book Review, writes of "Being Caribou" in Sunday's Times:

     "You can smell the scat, feel the icy slush in minus-35-degree weather and hear the thundering hoofs, the bleats of newborn calves sucked into frigid whirlpools and washed downstream to waiting grizzlies, wolves, hawks and other predators."

The full review here.

-- Francisco Vara-Orta

Photo: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times

The story of the man who saved Akitas

While Angelenos -- and celebrity trial watchers nationwide --  who lived through the O.J. Simpson trial may associate Akitas with the case, their presence reaches back centuries ago in Japanese culture, Martha Sherill writes in her latest book, "Dog Man."

In this week's Times Book Review section, Elizabeth Mehren, professor of journalism at Boston University and a former Times staff writer, says Sherill captures how "the legendary breed might have disappeared entirely without the single-minded determination of a hydroelectric plant manager named Morie Sawataishi in the high, rugged snow country of rural Japan."

Set during World War II, the book chronicles how Morie helps rescue an Akita puppy from death while facing down criticism from his own wife who says the family is too poor to feed a dog.

Sherill, a former Washington Post reporter, richly and tenderly chronicles Morie's life-long love affair with caring for the breed, but Mehren points out that the story at times reads "like something from the Post's Style section on steroids."

-- Francisco Vara-Orta

Photo: Joe Vitti / For The Times