REGIONAL— A monumental and authoritative new book is likely to be a must-have for every serious birder in the Upper Midwest. “Breeding Birds of Minnesota,” published by the University of Minnesota Press, offers a truly jaw-dropping amount of information from three of Minnesota’s premier birders on every bird species known to breed in Minnesota. The book includes maps, population graphs, outstanding photos, and detailed natural histories, including breeding habitat, population abundance, and conservation.
It’s not light reading to be sure. The dense, large format, hardcover book is 685 pages, includes 1,145 color images, and weighs in at just under nine pounds. It is exhaustive and a truly substantial achievement in the study of birds in Minnesota, which will make it an indispensable resource for the serious birder or the novice looking to increase their knowledge about the remarkable assemblage of bird that breed in Minnesota.
The state’s incredible diversity of birds is a reflection of Minnesota’s unique location as the only state found at the convergence of four major biomes, including boreal forest, aspen parklands, eastern deciduous forests, and prairie.
The book is the first comprehensive and in-depth assessment of the state’s breeding birds since T.S. Roberts published his foundational two-volume “Birds of Minnesota” in 1936.
This latest contribution highlights some of the critical issues facing bird populations and show that not all of the change in bird populations has been for the worse since Roberts published his original treatise. The book highlights the remarkable recovery of some bird species once seemingly consigned to extirpation in the state, including the American white pelican, the sandhill crane, and common raven, not to mention the trumpeter swan. Meanwhile, the book also reveals the dramatic declines in other species, such as black terns and eastern meadowlarks, over the past several decades.
The assessment of each bird species’ current status is drawn from the results of hundreds of individual reports from observers over the course of five breeding seasons that formed the basis for the online Minnesota breeding bird atlas.
The book’s three authors include Lee Pfannmuller, who served as state planning coordinator and interim executive director at Audubon Minnesota and also as director of the Division of Ecological Resources at the DNR. Gerald Niemi is a retired professor of biology, based at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Janet Green has been observing and studying the state’s birds since the 1960s and has been active with the National Audubon Society and the Minnesota Ornithologists Union. She has co-authored many Minnesota bird books and is co-founder of the Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory.