Until I brought home a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Feeder Birds: Eastern North America, the most-used field guide for birds at our home was Stan Tekiela's Birds of Pennsylvania. This well-worn volume fell in our estimation only because Peterson's guide proved to have a more intuitive method for identifying birds that frequent our feeders, with side-by-side drawings making comparisons much simpler than flipping back and forth between entries.

Notwithstanding, Tekiela's book has been a boon here for many years, and I have lost count of the number of sticky bookmarks my daughter has left between the pages to show off the birds she has seen and identified with it.

Birds of Pennsylvania begins with a brief, easy-to-read section on birdwatching, identification strategies, traits and migration habits. Then it's on to the meat of the book: a page by page description of every bird likely to be seen in the commonwealth.

Each two-page section features a vivid, colorful photo of the bird in question on one side, a detailed description of the bird's characteristics on the other. It includes a color-coded state map showing the bird's range and details such as the bird's size, differences in appearance between females, males and juveniles, nesting habits, egg types and food preferences. There's a handy comparison to similar birds (with specific notes on their differences) and an interesting note about other miscellaneous facts.

The book is perfectly sized to slip into a back pants pocket for field observations, or it sits neatly on a shelf for quick reference through a window to the backyard. I also like the specificity; while Peterson's book covers the entirety of the eastern and central portions of North America, Tekiela's focuses solely on Pennsylvania.

I firmly believe any birder, serious or casual, will want more than one reference book on hand, and I recommend Birds of Pennsylvania for anyone in the state to include in their collection. (P.S. My copy of Tekiela's field guide was published in 2000 and, while I don't imagine much has changed, the book was republished in an expanded form in 2021.)