For each season, Nic Bishop includes a fantastic two-page, life-sized photo scene with many of the common insects and animals you might see in places like the leafy understory, treetops, edge of the woods and even at night.  The animals are in the habitat where they would normally be found giving you clues about where to look during your nature walk.

After the photo spread, another two-page spread follows that identifies and describes each of the 20 or so critters included on the previous pages.  In all, there are seven different photo scenes that will help you identify well over 100 woodland creatures!  This is the perfect field guide for younger children with its clear pictures and simple descriptions.

The author has included tips about keeping a nature journal, what to watch for each season and a pictorial index, too.  All of this in 48 pages.  Now, since it’s life-sized it is a little more cumbersome to carry around on a nature walk than other field guides, but I think you’ll find that the large size is worth it!

Finding a good field guide for studying animals tracks can be more difficult than you might imagine.  I want to highlight the Peterson Field Guide to Animal Tracks as the best one I’ve found on the subject thus far.

There’s a quick picture guide in the beginning of the book to help you make an initial guess at the track you’re viewing.  Several animal tracks are shown together which helps you make a quick comparison of several possible tracks to the one you’re trying to identify.

After you believe you’ve found the right track, a page number is referenced to find more detailed pictures, sketches and information about the animal that made the track.  Approximate track lengths and widths are given, as well as the distance between feet and the animal’s typical stride.

Depending on the animal, you may find sketches of other signs such as scat (poop), nests/burrows, marks they make as they gnaw on food, or foods they typically eat.

A written section continues to explain the animal’s habitat, behaviors, foods and even the sounds they make, as well as comparisons to animals that might make similar tracks.

Sections of the book include:

• opossums
• shrews
• moles
• armadillos
• pikas, hares and rabbits
• rodents
• dogs, foxes and wolves
• bears
• hair seals and eared seals
• raccoons, ringtails and coatis
• weasels, otters and badgers
• skunks
• cats
• hoofed animals
• birds
• amphibians and reptiles
• insects and other invertebrates

Even though it’s compact enough to fit in your nature bag, you can see that A LOT of animals are covered in 391 pages!  There’s even a handy centimeter/inch ruler built into the back cover to help you make track determinations in the field.

You can find all the other Peterson Field Guides by subject at Houghlton Mifflin’s website.

Raccoon prints in mud at the edge of a creek

What do you use for animal track/animal sign identification?

~Cindy

Now, Melissa may differ with me and decide to put up a post about her favorites.  :)  But, for this post, I want to focus on why I like the Audubon guides best overall.

• They’re inexpensive!  At Amazon, most of them are right around $14.00.  That’s very affordable when purchasing one at a time over the span of several years.  (At least that’s the way I’ve done it!)

• They’re durable!  This would be very important to me even if I didn’t have three children who want to handle the books after they’ve romped in the creek or dug a critter out of the dirt!  The cover is vinyl, so dirties can be wiped off and it’s less likely to be bent traveling in a nature bag.  The pages are also tightly bound.  In fact, I’ve never had one of the Audubon guides lose a page or break at the binding.

• They’re small enough to fit in a nature bag, but big enough to have very clear pictures.

• They’re thorough.  It’s hard to be thorough in the world of nature because God is so awesome and creative!  But, even though the books can’t cover everything, I’ve found them to be quite helpful for identifying most things.

• They’re organized.  I’m a Martha Stewart at heart.  (My kids aren’t, but that’s another post for another day.)  I like when books are organized in a reasonable manner.  It doesn’t take us any time to figure out where to look in the book for a certain colored nature object or a certain size.  Pictures are categorized in the front half of the book with a very clear system that makes it so easy that children can locate things without much help.  In the back of the book you find detailed descriptions about each nature object such as – size, color, texture, range, season and much more.

So there you have it.  The “why” behind my general recommendation.  When I come across a field guide that stands out from Audubon, I’ll be sure to share it!  Which are your favorites?

~Cindy

On my personal blog, I posted about our scavenger hunt and dissections.  I hope you’ll take a peek if you’re planning to study wildflowers anytime soon.

Queen Anne's Lace

To end the study, we went on a short walk to the back of our farm.  The goal was to see how many wildflowers we could find and how many of those we could identify.  In about 500 feet, we tallied 30 types of wildflowers!  Considering it’s late August and many of the flowers are gone already, I was amazed!

After much practice, we’re getting pretty good at knowing the flowers around our farm.  I’d estimate that we were able to name half of them without using our field guide.  Of the other half, we only lack the names of three or four of them.  Not bad!

I couldn’t help including this picture!  As we were in some weeds trying to get a good picture of the Spotted Touch-me-not, Mahayla screamed.  She was standing right beside an orb web almost as tall as her.  Right in the middle was a really big Black and Yellow Argiope.  It was absolutely beautiful!

You can find these ideas for studying wildflowers and MANY more in the Wonderful Wildflower NaturExplorer unit!

~Cindy