I'm not going to argue the worth of photographs vs. illustrations. Everyone picks which works better for them, and that's that. I've tried both and prefer photos.

My wife and I use both the Audubon and Stokes guides. Were we forced to pick a favorite, I would go with the Audubon guide, she with the Stokes. Both have different advantages and issues.

The Audubon guide has a very flexible and convenient binding. The book is tall for its width and it lends itself nicely to thumbing through the pages. The organization of the photo section is by size within color within species type. Finding a male purple finch is as simple as flipping quickly to the handful of red, perching birds of the same approximate size, and zeroing in on the right entry.

That, however, leads to the first disadvantage - unless the male and female share overall coloration, they will be shown on separate pages and/or in separate sections. While that makes some sense, given the intent of the book's organization, it makes subsequently reading about the species less convenient.

That leads to the second disadvantage - photos and text are in separate halves of the book. Once you've identified a species from a photo, you have to look up the text page separately. It slows things down.

By using both the Stokes guide (which has photos and text on the same page) and the Audubon guide, we get the best of both worlds. The coverage of the two guides is slightly different, so we actually have more species at our fingertips than with either guide alone. When we get frustrated by one or the other, depending on what the search issue happens to be, there's the other, organized differently, which often solves the problem. Both guides are photographic, and we find the different photos often make or break a particular species identification.

The Stokes guide may be found here: Stokes Field Guide to Birds: Eastern Region (Stokes Field Guides).

Purchased two good "bird" books at the same time. This is the easiest of the two for finding birds, and I thoroughly recommend it.

This revised edition replaced my old worn out copy that I've had since the mid 1980s. This guide, and the Peterson's are two must have guides for every avid birder. When identifying a new bird, I find myself reaching for this one first. Because of the colored thumb tabs, identification is usually very fast. But if I am still not completely sure, then I'll pick up the Petersons and combine information. Of course one can never have too many bird books, but owning both the Audubons and the Petersons will have you covered.

I've had so much fun identifying birds since I received this book. There were many I had often seen but never knew what they were. Oila! Now I do. I even bought one for a friend. This is a great reference for those who are new to bird watching. Wish I'd taken it on vacation with me.

The photographs in this book are incredibly gorgeous. There are over 600 photographs, all of them crisp, clear and close up. The book includes information about territories, nesting habits and even describes the sounds the birds make in detail. This is a wonderful book not only to be enjoyed by bird watcher but also to be used by couch potatoes like me who don't get out much. But you might be inspired to get out and look for birds after a mere glance through this beautiful field guide. Well worth having.

The book is very easy to use. Took it to Nova Scotia and found the birds I was seeking.

I have an older Audubon bird book that I like better.Although the pictures are nice in this one,I like the layout better in the old one.

Beautiful pictures combined with superb write ups on habitat and habits. We have used to identify many beautiful birds right in our own backyard. Makes a great gift for the bird watcher in your circle.

I purchased this as a gift for my recently retired father. As soon as it arrived I checked it out and wished I had bought it for myself. My meager field guide was no comparison! It contains beautiful photos and is so nicely cross referenced. A few days after I gave it to my dad, he called to thank me again and also raved about what a superior guide it is.

Everything I could have hoped for. Great photos and information. Compact enough to put in my field bag. Easy to access, even with gloves on! A great book for a beginning bird watcher. "Audubon Society", that says it all. And, it was certainly priced right.

Great book. My husband and I have this book that my parents gave us several years ago and we love it so we purchased one for our friends who live in Atlanta, GA and are just getting into birds and wanted to be able to identify the birds that visit their feeders.

Excellent guide for the bird watcher. Great for new bird watchers. This was a gift as I already have one. The person recieving the book states it is the best. He has other books, but this is the best.

Beautiful pictures and great info packed into this duable guide. Great gift for the Bird watchers among us.

This has to be the best field guide I've ever used. It's well organized and simple enough for a beginning birder. It's also crammed full of information for the more serious ornithologist. The photos are spectacular!

The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region is the most comprehensive guide that I have enjoyed in many years. It has clear, concise pictures of the birds of my region with a written synopsis of each bird's habitat. I recommend this book to any avid bird lover! It is an awesome book!

This book provides excellent descriptions of the birds' physical appearances, lots of photographs, and maps of their winter and summer range. It is small enough that you could take it out birding, and has a durable cover. You will not be disappointed!

My favorite bird watching book because all the photos are organized by color of bird and variety of birds. The plentiful information is carefully correlated but is not on the page with the photos. I prefer this when I am searching for the bird in my view. Handy is size and shape for quick browsing.

I also have the rocks and minerals guide and the guide for N.American trees.

the best, most informative,with clear photos instead of drawings as in other bird reference books.

Bought this for our son and family in the "deep woods". They've little or no background on birding. Great selection for them: sections are divided to make it easy to locate a "type" of bird (perching, diving, etc.); great color plates and good info in the text, including stuff on nesting! Girls (10 & 12) enjoy as much as do their parents.

Excellent photography. Bird descriptions are accurate and easy to use. Book is organized so as to facilitate quick bird lookup. This book is both a visual joy and a joy to use.

To my fellow bird watchers all over Eastern America: If you don't have this guide, you are missing out. It is a wonderful little book for any avid bird watcher. It has never failed me yet in identifying the species in my area.

I had this book years ago and lost it. I HAD to have it again. It's excellent for identifying both sexes of the species. Seeing actual pictures of the bird is far better than a drawing; it helps take the guess work out. And of course the information about each type of bird is also excellent. I love this book and take it with me where ever I go birding. It's perfect purse size. I even take it on vacations, just incase I see something different that I'd like to identfy. You just never know when something different might fly into your path.

This book is very nice. The pictures are great. The pictures will even tell you what to expect, such as if it is a female or if it is the bird's light phase. The only thing I wish is that the descriptions along with the general area the birds are located in was with the pictures and not in the back of the book.

These are the best books for bird watching. I haven't seen a bird that I couldn't find in this book. Living in the country in Tennessee and feeding our wild birds we see a lot of different species and some are hard to differentiate. The Audubon color plates make things a lot easier. I've been able to identify 6 species of woodpecker on one tree alone. If you like watching wild birds it's a must have.

This field guide is the first one that I purchased when I was a young married, and now 30 years later, that poor copy was falling apart, from constant use. I never was a "birder" in the sense of going out into the woods and carrying binoculars, but I have always loved having bird feeders set up near windows and one actually nailed onto the outside of my kitchen window for the closest possible scrutiny. And the Nat'l Audubon Soc. Field Guide has been my mainstay all these years. I used the blank back pages of the book to jot down the types of birds that I observed, and when we moved into town, I continued doing so, interested in seeing which birds were townies and which (unfortunately) I had to say goodbye to. An amazing number of country birds would sometimes show up at my town birdfeeder, however, so the Field Guide was never far from a windowsill, with a pen stuck in it. The photographs are very good, and the explanations of habitat and habits, as well as descriptions, are excellent. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what lovely flyer he/she is being charmed with at any given moment.

This book, like the Western Guide, is easy to take with you but it also suffers from, what is to us, photos that aren't all that easy to compare with what we see. We had a difficult time trying to identify a woodpecker we saw because the book only described the juvenile phases which is what we think we saw. We have also run into descriptions that are half and half leaving us still wondering what we did see. I wish that they could fix that so it is more comprehensive.

Other reviewers have correctly noted this guide's inclusion of upwards of 300 pages of gorgeous color plates of sea, woodland, shore and freshwater birds, not to mention dozens of species of prey.

But as others have also reported, the book is not always great for watching birds in the field, as it requires flipping back and forth between the color plates and the 400 pages plus of habitat, range, call, size, coloring and other data to determine whether one is viewing the type of bird one thinks; generally speaking, before the id is made, the bird is gone.

Still, this is a good book to have on hand, as it's provides a good reference book before heading to the field--and after the fact. We've been occasional birders for the better part of several decades, and this reference has always been a good friend.

This guide was not designed for field birding.
It's not pure evil, but one key mistake was made- the pictures and the text are (shudder) seperate. Frantically fliping through your book while your life bird is perched fifty feet away, not impressed by your frenzy, is not a fun experience. Desk reference. Get Nat. Geo. guide, Sibley guide, or Stokes guide-just save this for consultation when you return to the house.

Excellent book for every bird watcher.

Great pictures Would have liked pictures of the male, the female and the juvenal printed next to each other.

This was for my wife--it is just what she was hoping for.

Excellent guide, especially for beginners like me. I have their guide for NE region trees and highly reccommed that also.

I carry several guides with me everytime I go to the field. This is one of those I take (have since it's publication). While I do not feel it is as good as Peterson's guides (or even those of Sibley for that matter), I do find this work to be very useful as a supplemental guide. It does have information not found in a couple of the other guides and at times the actual photograph, rather than a drawing, help identify. I cannot say that I would be comfortable with only this as a guide, but I have found it useful. The photographs are quite good actually, and a joy to examine. For quick identification though, after a brief glimps of a given bird, I really need a bit more. Overall recommend this one highly.

This book may not picture the birds from all angels and in all phases the way others do - because instead of drawings this book uses photos for each bird.
I love it! Drawings can be decieving - photos have helped me identify species.

This guide is a very useful for the casual or backyard birder. It takes the route of showing pictures of the birds instead of illustrations. The real benefit however is the layout of the pictures. Instead of grouping the birds by families, or genus, or species it groups by the most recognizable features of shape, size and coloring.

The drawbacks of the guide however are that the detailed information is placed not with the pictures but in a seperate section. Secondly the other main detraction of the book is that while the pictures are a great place to start in identifying birds illustrations can be the better route when you advance to more difficult identifications. A great companion volume for this would be the Sibley Guide.

This is a "must have" for everyone. The format is very easy to use. The photgraphy is spectacular and the descriptions of each bird is very readable and easy to understand. I have given this book to many of my friends and relatives so they too may enjoy and identify the world of birds.

As homeschool mom this book works for us. We still find it hard to id some birds, but we use this a a good starting point.

The book is great. I have a bird feeder outside my kitchen window and I never knew the names of the birds that feed on it other than the sparrows. I now know the names and recognize about 12 different species.

Having finally moved to a house that would give me an opportunity to see a wide variety of birds; I thought a guide would be useful. Not being an avid birdwatcher I thought The Audobon Society would be the place to look, but I found this guide to be just OK. Separating the photos from the descriptions is more than a little annoying, and the photos themselves only show one angle so identification for the novice is often dependent upon seeing the bird from the correct angle. While fairly comprehensive and not without its uses; I will look elsewhere for a guide that better suits the needs of the novice birdwatcher.

I've got lots of bird guides, books, etc. Although I already have a lot of books, I thought it was time to get an Audubon book. Don't get me wrong - the pictures are OUTSTANDING. It is just an annoying setup with all the pictures in the front and the bird information in the back, causing you to have to flip back and forth to identify a bird. They need to fix this design in the next edition. It has a lot of great info in the bird description section. But, when I go out looking for birds, I leave this one at home.

While I don't consider myself to be a "birder," I do enjoy watching the birds which come to visit my yard, and I like to be able to identify them. I've found this book to be very handy in helping me to name the birds I see both in my yard and during my 40-minute daily commute. The first part of the book contains clear, full-color pictures of each species, helpfully organized by both types of birds (eg, tree perching, upright land, etc.) and color, making it quick and easy to find the bird you are looking for. The second half of the book offers useful narrative information which is both detailed and concise. My one complaint about this book is that for most birds, there is only one photograph, making it hard to distinguish between male versus female, immature versus mature, etc. Overall, however, this book has greatly enhanced my pleasure in backyard bird-watching.

This is an excellent guide to identifying birds. The National Audubon Society is an excellent authority on all things nature, and therefore it is not surprising that the National Audubon Society would publish a helpful guide. The guide helps a birder identify birds by behavior, size, habitat, plumage, call, and location. There are color photographs of many birds to guide the birder. The plates are grouped by family which makes basic identification easy. The book also has a section that describes each bird as well as maps that show the likely locations where birds can be found. The color plates are enjoyable simply to look at, and can help a person prepare for possible sightings. The book is small enough that it can be carried to the field. The cover is also durable so it can withstand wear and tear. Since the boos are divided buy Eastern Region and Western Region, so the book is not very cumbersome.

I have used many of Audubon's Field Guides, and they are very helpful and usually organized and easy to understand. However, this one is extremely complex and confusing.

When I find an interesting bird, I would go grab my binoculars and field guide and look it up. I go to the correct catagory and frantically search for the bird. When I find it, it gives me a detailed color picture that helps identify the bird. However, if you want more information, it than refers you to a different page, hundreds of thin pages away. You than need to go and find the page, but by then, the bird is gone. When I do get to the page, it is filled with wonderful detailed information of appearance, voice, habitat, nesting, range, map of habitat, and a brief summary.

The book is nice, but I would recommend buying another one with more organization.

Field guides are great to have because they're small and their entire aim is to help you immediately identify a bird you see before you. Every birder should have at least one field guide, and maybe even several - some to keep in the car or by a window.

Being published by the National Audubon Society, you'd expect this field guide to be top-notch, one developed and tested by thousands of birders. Indeed, the photos are very nice, full color and in 'native habitat'. The descriptions are pretty complete - with size, key things to look for, song, hapitat. There's a little map showing range, and the range is also described as well.

The problem is with the layout. All of the pictures are at the front of the book - put into groups by bird type, three to a page. Often there's only one photo of a bird, even though they look different during different years of life or seasons. If you see something that seems it might be right, now you have to go flipping through many pages to track down the actual *information* on that bird. Does it even live where you're looking? Are there other similar birds it might be instead? What are those key features you're supposed to be watching for? By the time you figure any of this out, the bird is probably back in hiding.

It seems with their knowledge of birders and how birders operate, they'd have arranged this book in an easier-to-use fashion. While this is a nice book to have for its lovely pictures, it's not what I grab when I need to bring a field book with me on a trip.