ASNV is pleased to announce that a new digital picture book on local birds, tailored to beginners, is now available free of charge on the ASNV website. It is written by an experienced Connecticut birder and educator, Florence McBride, who responded to a request from a Northern Virginia teacher for bird-study materials to use during the pandemic. The book covers many common birds of our area and arranges them by color, except for the birds of prey and the water birds. It also identifies whether each species is a permanent resident or migratory – here in spring-summer-fall or fall-winter-spring. The book gives each bird’s length and shows separate pictures of male and female, or adult and immature, if they look different. Other information may include notes about identifying the birds’ songs and calls, and feeding or nesting behavior. Useful links to the ASNV Northern Virginia bird list and Cornell Lab’s “All About Birds” Bird Guide, and Merlin app can be found in the introduction.
The book is copyrighted and may be shared free of charge digitally or as (self-printed) hard copy for non-commercial personal and educational use. It is also readable on a smartphone. For more specific information on use of the book and the pictures within it, please see the introduction and the picture credits (near the end of the book.) Notes on the author, including her recent photographic preservation of the Birds of Connecticut exhibition in Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, can be found at the end of the book.
A link to the book in downloadable PDF format may be found on the ASNV website here. We hope Florence McBride’s book is an inspiration for all educators and beginning birders in Northern Virginia!