A Birder's Guide to the Texas Coast (ABA/Lane Birdfinding Guide)

A Birder's Guide to the Texas Coast will be indispensable as your field guide to one of the world's premier birding destinations. The Texas coast is home to an amazing number of migrating and wintering birds, as well as many specialty resident and nesting species. The habitat diversity ranges from the Pineywoods to the Gulf prairies, from the coastal wetlands to the South Texas subtropics. The spring migration of neotropical birds along the coast is one of North America's most remarkable birding spectacles. And the region is host to some of the nation's largest congregations of herons, egrets, rails, shorebirds, gulls, and terns at any season. A Birder's Guide to the Texas Coast includes Species Accounts for over 170 Texas specialties, and more than 70 new sites, for a total of over 200 birding stops, as well as bar-graphs for 388 regularly occurring Texas Coast species.

Mel Cooksey has developed a passion for the study of Texas Coast birds since he moved there in the 1980s. His special interests include developing a greater understanding of migration trends, abundance, status, and distribution. He has been a speaker and trip leader at South Texas ABA conventions and conferences as well as compiling various regional bird checklists. Mel has served as compiler of Audubon Christmas Counts in Kansas and Texas, and as a sub-regional editor for North American Birds for South Texas. He currently serves on the Texas Bird Records Committee. Ron Weeks is a chemical engineer who has lived and birded extensively in Montana, Michigan, and Texas. He is currently the president-elect of the Texas Ornithological Society and the North American Birds sub-regional editor for the Upper Texas Coast. Ron developed the route and organized the team that set the Texas and National Big Day record of 258 species in 2001, and has been a part of record-setting teams in Michigan, Montana, and Idaho. He authored Birds and Bird Finding in the Saginaw Bay Area and coauthored Birdlife of Houston, Galveston, and the Upper Texas Coast. Ron lives in Lake Jackson with his wife and their two children.