The Birder's Guide To Vancouver And The Lower Mainland, is a practical guide to the birds of this region. Well designed and beautifully produced, this guide book covers the over 400 species of birds that can be found in the Vancouver area, one of the most remarkable bird locations on the continent. The Fraser River estuary area is an important part of the Pacific Flyway. "Millions of shorebirds and waterfowl pass through here on their migratory routes between Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada, and California, Central America and South America. The region is also an important wintering area for raptors." This book is about the place where I was born and raised: east-end Vancouver, the bush lands of North Burnaby, the coastline of Burrard Inlet (especially at New Brighton), the Iron workers Memorial Bridge at Second Narrows, the North Vancouver fore shore, Seymour Creek, Stanley Park, English Bay, Spanish Banks as well as the sloughs and marshes and fore shores of Ladner, Boundary Bay, Burns Bog, Pitt Meadows, and the Fraser Valley where my father took us on his weekly rambles over the country, fishing or picking blue berries or hazel nuts, or crabbing or checking the crayfish traps in his string in one of the rivers (the Nicomekl, the Serpentine, the Alouette) that ambled through the Fraser Valley. We were always looking at, or pointing out birds and thinking about them since they were everywhere around us in their great variety and numbers.
The Birder's Guide to Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, written and photographed by a cast of over fifty contributors has been put together in a format that does justice to its purpose of guiding birders through a virtual bird paradise, a temperate Pacific climate in an urban region of two million human inhabitants. This book's fifty contributors have done an excellent job providing in-depth information accompanied by local maps that contain excellent information on how to access a myriad of sites in the region by car from downtown Vancouver or by public transit. This is a wonderful book full of detailed lore about the important bird areas in the region and the birds that reside there and it offers a plethora of coloured photographs.
One of the most delightful chapters in this volume is the self-explanatory Chapter 31, "Birding from BC Ferries". This is a book for local and visiting folk. The compilers of The Birds Of Vancouver And The Lower Mainland have considered every angle, producing the best guide book on birding in a region with which I'm well familiar.