Birds and Birding on the Mississippi Coast
Birds and Birding on the Mississippi Coast
If you are a birdwatcher, this book will be a delight. If you can already identify the bird but wish to know where else to sight it, then this quick-reference book will be a friend and companion. Birds and Birding on the Mississippi Coast by Judith A. Toups and Jerome A. Jackson is the first book to focus attention on sighting the 357 species of birds known to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It fills a long-standing need for a comprehensive, up-to-date guide to sites in the coastal counties of Hancock, Harrison, and Jackson where this wide range of birds can be located.
Compiled and recorded by two noted birders, this book includes a chapter on the region’s past and present ornithological history, accounts of the breeding pattern and distribution of coastal birds, instructive narratives, and maps of dozens of birding sites both on the mainland and the barrier islands. The authors also include a sample itinerary for a field trip, a bird-finding calendar, and an easy-to-use population graph.
This exemplary bird-finding guide will meet the requirements of birders at any level of experience. One chapter entitled “How to Find 50% of Mississippi’s Birds in the Shortest Period of Time—A Birding Challenge” offers a first for books of this genre: bird-by-bird, place-by-place, hour-by-hour plans for finding 184 species in one day are spelled out for those birdwatchers driven by the challenge and the demands of a time schedule.
This is the book to take along with your bird-identification guide. It has a complete index of coastal birds and birding sites. This book is sponsored by the Mississippi–Alabama Sea Grant Consortium.
Essential for any birder on the Mississippi Coast, this book tells us where, when, and how to find the birds there. Toups and Jackson are the experts in this area, and they have gone to great lengths to tell us how to go birding there and what they have found so far. So if you plan to go birding on the Mississippi Coast, or if you just wonder what it would be like to go birding there, this is the book for you!
The Mississippi Coast—among the most fascinating of birding areas—is now given the in-depth treatment for which we have been waiting.
If there are any others than Judy Toups and Jerry Jackson whose experience, understanding, and writing skills make them better candidates to discourse on the birdlife of the Mississippi Coast, I’ve never met them.
Long needed, this book gives current information on the distribution of bird life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Where else can you find three species of beautiful kites, plus Sandhill Cranes!
Judith A. Toups wrote a popular weekly newspaper column, "Birding on the Coast," for many years. Jerome A. Jackson is editor of Bird Conservation, regional editor of American Birds, and a professor of biological sciences at Mississippi State University.
