A Birder's Guide to the Chicago Region by Lynne Carpenter, Joel Greenberg

Identifying more than 250 top sites for birding within a 65-mile radius from downtown Chicago, this useful guide provides maps, directions, and other information essential for discovering the birds of the area in their natural habitats. The most thorough guide of its kind, it covers nineteen counties of the greater Chicago area.

A Birder's Guide to the Chicago Region includes detailed descriptions of local habitats and maps that show where to find birds in nearby Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, as well as Illinois. While providing a wealth of practical information, the guide is enriched with insightful accounts of the natural history and ecology of particular areas.

An essential guide for either beginning or experienced birders, this book will appeal to anyone who appreciates nature and wants to learn more about the natural history, ecology, and especially the birds of the Chicago area. (1999)

A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction by Joel Greenberg

In the early 19th century passenger pigeons accounted for 25 to 40 percent of North America's birds, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours. Although adults weighed only twelve ounces, they nested and roosted in the millions, destroying large oaks as if hit by hurricanes. Their favorite foods were the seeds and nuts of beech, chestnuts, and other forest trees, but they also raided farmers' buckwheat, wheat, corn, and rye crops.

John James Audubon, remarking on their speed and agility in flight, said a lone passenger pigeon streaking through the forest "passes like a thought." The observation was prophetic, for although a billion pigeons streamed over Toronto in May of 1860, a mere forty years later passenger pigeons were almost extinct. Martha, the last of the species, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.

Their congregation in large numbers made it easy to kill them en masse, and the expansion of railroads and telegraph lines facilitated large hunting parties that supplied pigeons by the thousands to help feed people in growing cities. Audubon, novelist Gene Stratton-Porter, and James Fenimore Cooper were among those who advocated saving the passenger pigeon, but it was too late. Naturalist Joel Greenberg's beautifully written story of the passenger pigeon provides a cautionary tale that no matter how abundant a resource is - animals, water or oil - it can be wiped out if we are not careful. (2014)