The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior

Bird Life & Behavior new cover design for the flexibound edition in 2009

Bird Life & Behavior original cover design for hardcover edition in 2000

info from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Info and sales at your local independent bookstore or Amazon.com

Published 2001, new cover in Sep 2009 (but no editorial changes)

A leatherbound edition published by Easton Press

Updates and corrections are here

Which bird book should I buy?

Related information:

A list of reference sources and further reading, listed by chapter, is here

The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, published in October 2001, was conceived as the companion to the Guide to Birds. This book provides a wealth of detail about the nesting, mating, and other behavior. Even though these things do not have direct application to identification, and are not included in the identification guide, these behaviors are truly fascinating, and birders enjoy knowing about them. The plan for this book was to provide a layperson’s introduction to the most intriguing and interesting facets of the birds’ lives – emphasizing things that birders are likely to see and ask about, and things that add to a larger picture of the natural world.

Excellent books such as The Birder’s Handbook and Lives of North American Birds already provide detailed data on each species individually. If you want to know the incubation period of the Lewis’ Woodpecker you can find it there. My goal in Bird Life and Behavior was to offer a synthesis, presenting the information and also interpreting it to describe patterns and the reasons behind them. This book will tell you that the incubation period for all species of woodpeckers is about the same at 11 to 14 days.

I envisioned it as a book that would function the way a good field trip leader does – pointing out the things that make the birds more interesting and that relate the birds to other species and to their environment, enriching the whole birding experience. I drew on my 11 years experience as a professional bird tour leader to set the style and to choose the types of information that would be presented in the guide.