Praise for the new Sibley Guide to Trees

"Trees," he said, "are things that everyone sees every day."

David Sibley, author of the well loved and easy to use Sibley guides to birds and birding, now offers us a way to easily identify the trees in our very own habitat.

..."he thought he could produce something more user-friendly than the existing guides whose methodology for tree identification involves a lengthy, frustrating sorting process... " "If you're out in the park and you notice from 100 feet away a tree with unusual flowers or an odd leaf shape or interesting bark, these books require you to walk up to the tree, take a twig in your hand and go through a series of steps," said Mr. Sibley. "It's at least five minutes until you come up with an answer. And immediately you lose sight of the whole tree and you lose sight of what attracted your attention in the first place. Taking a step back and looking at the whole tree, then looking at a few more trees and flipping through the pages of my book, you quickly start to see that all the maples have similarly shaped leaves and fruit and that all the oaks have acorns."

All the time Mr. Sibley was focused on trees, he kept his core constituency—birdwatchers—in mind. "I wanted to produce a guide you could use if you were looking through binoculars to a bird at the top of a tree, and you wanted to turn your attention to the tree without moving your binoculars."

From a review of the new The Sibley Guide to Trees. Article titled David Sibley's Habitat by Joanne Kaufman writing for the Wall Street Journal.

It goes on my wish list.

Sia

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