My Field Guide to Birds of Illinois

As you can kind of tell from some of the 'Christmas Haul' posts here on the blog, it was a birding-kind-of-holiday in our house.  I posted about the two kinds of suet (simply and hot pepper), the fruit and nut bell and just yesterday, I posted a photo of the water wiggler for our bird bath.  With all those treats to try to lure birds to our feeders and backyard, Nat was thoughtful enough to also get me this Field Guide to Birds of Illinois from the American Birding Association.  We've already put it to work by documenting some of the feathered friends who have come to our feeders.  I'll post some side-by-side photos and the descriptions of the birds from this book in the next few days.

Here's a look at a spread in the book for a two woodpeckers.

I really like that this is an Illinois-specific Field Guide because it narrows down the searching we have to do to identify the species that are visiting.