How to Be a Better Birder, Derek Lovitch, Princeton University Press, 2012, soft cover 192 pages with illustrations and maps.

This book actually can help you be a better birder. Lovitch assumes you know something about birding (but you needn't), then seeks to sharpen and add to your skills with useful information clearly and cleanly presented.

Lovitch will help you better understand the importance to your success of habitat, geography, weather, birding at night, vagrants, birding with a purpose, and more. The publisher calls it, correctly, a crash course in advanced birding combining old-fashioned observation skills with the new technology that has so changed the birding experience.

Lovitch owns Freeport Wild Bird Supply in Maine. He has worked on various birding research and education projects in the United States, and has written for birding magazines. He comes at his subjects more or less as casual birders might, to the benefit of the reader.