The Sibley Guide to Birds

A new field guide!    I love field guides and I think it's important to have several different kinds.   Thanks so much to my MIL for passing this one along to us. 

This book is published by the National Audubon Society, and written by David Sibley. 

It is organized by bird type - waterbirds first, then shorebirds, then birds of field and forest.    Each entry has a color drawing of the bird both male and female [juvenile if necessary], as well as in flight, often with a flight silhouette.   Significant features are indicated with arrows and a short description to help you identify gender and distiguish between species. 

Even better is a description of the voice [very helpful!] and map of the distribution of the species over North America.

This is an excellent guide and one that I am very happy to add to our collection of field guides.

Tracks

We get little [and big] visitors all the time.    The edges of the creek bed are full of prints.   Here are some that we found this week.

So, who left these tracks?    With this handy-dandy Northwoods Tracks guide - put out by the Wildlife Conservation Society - we can find out.    [We got ours at the Muscatatuck NWR Nature Center.]

According to the guide, these tracks were raccoon:

This is a front left paw.  Notice the very long fingers tipped with a claw.  The claw marks in this print are very distinct - they aren't always.


These were possum.  [Or opossum, if you insist.   But only if you insist.]

Notice the very rounded finger tips.   The right print is from a left front paw.    The pad is very short - less than the length of the fingers.    The left print is from a left rear paw.   The pad is longer and there's an odd indentation that hangs way down off the right corner of the pad.  [Kind of hard to see in the photo.]

So, there you have it. 

Once in a while, if I'm really lucky, we find these tracks on the creek bed.