The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds By Richard Crossley

By making identification easier, more accurate, and more fun than ever before, The Crossley ID Guide will completely redefine how its users look at birds. Essential for all birders, it also promises to make new birders of many people who have despaired of using traditional guides.

• • Revolutionary. This book changes field guide design to make you a better birder

• • A picture says a thousand words. The most comprehensive guide: 640 stunning scenes created from 10,000 of the author’s photographs

• • Reality birding. Lifelike in-focus scenes show birds in their habitats, from near and far, and in all plumages and behaviors

• • Teaching and reference. The first book to accurately portray all the key identification characteristics: size, shape, behavior, probability, and color

• • Practice makes perfect. An interactive learning experience to sharpen and test field identification skills

• • Bird like the experts. The first book to simplify birding and help you understand how to bird like the best

Richard Crossley is an internationally acclaimed birder, photographer and award winning author of ‘The Crossley ID Guide’ series. Crazy, wildly passionate, driven and single-minded are just a few of the words used to describe his love of birding and the outdoors.
Born in Yorkshire, Richard first visited Cape May, USA after graduating, and moved there in 1991 after falling in love with the birding and town. After 20 years of hiding in the business world while raising his family (with wife Debra, 2 kids and a dog – all blondes), Richard co-authored the successful The Shorebird Guide. He quickly became obsessed with the newfound opportunities provided by digital technology, Photoshop and book design. The Crossley ID Guide series was created.
The innovative design shows a more lifelike and complete picture, challenging many of the traditional ‘old-school’ book layouts. This allows kids and beginners a better understanding of the looks and lives of birds. Recognized with multiple awards, this series has created a movement for other wildlife guides to put more emphasis on habitat, behavior and other imagery that we can relate to in real life.
Richard is also co-founder of the global birding initiative Pledge to Fledge, Race4Birds and The Cape May Young Birders Club. He has contributed to most major birding publications, is frequently heard on radio and is a highly sought-after public speaker. He served on the board of directors at the famous Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. He firmly believes that the time is right to popularize birding in the USA and other parts of the world.
When recently asked why he takes on so many projects, his answer, “it beats working” sums up his passion for everything outdoors.

“Believe the hype! The plates are incredible. . . . [People] will absolutely love it, especially people new to birding the main part of the book’s target audience. . . . For me some of the plates were good enough to stick on the wall in a frame as a work of art. . . . I salute Richard Crossley’s bravery. I think it’s a brilliant, innovative idea and everyone should get a copy.”, Urban Birder

“[The Crossley ID Guide series focuses] on maximising your chances of correctly identifying species by ramping up the number and variety of species images within the guide and placing these images within typical habitats. . . . Each beautiful plate is painstakingly filled with images of hundreds of individual species in different settings or from different angles to help recreate how you might encounter it.”—Kate Jones, New Scientist

“For those of you in eastern North America, particularly if you are a visual learner, The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds by Richard Crossley is a great way to begin learning the visual cues that are important in identifying birds.”, Bird Watcher’s Digest

“Birders and casual backyard bird-watchers will find a new species of bird guide in The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds. The book is more a reference book and instructional guide.”—Linda Scarth, Booklist

“The many images provide a rich resource for even the most seasoned birders. My wife pointed out the red lores of a snowy egret in one of the photographs. This color appears briefly early in the breeding season. I had never seen this feature nor even been aware of it. . . . A wonderful addition to the birding literature.”—Herb Wilson, Portland Press Herald

“What a fantastic book. I realized at once what all the other great books were lacking. This IS an ‘ID’ book, not an in-depth reference on bird data but a unique way of expressing easy ID in the field. It’s perfect. The multiple positions in the pages are phenomenal–why hasn’t this been done before? This is totally unlike any other bird book out there ever!”—Tom Watson, Wavetamer Adventures

“No other field guide comes close to giving the variety of plumage, habitat and behavior. For the armchair birder, there is no equal to Crossley.”—Ronnie Blackwell, Sun Herald

“[A] very impressive, attractive, thought-provoking book which has quickly established itself as a must-have for many birders. Is it the best photo guide ever produced?: almost certainly. And there is a companion volume on the Birds of Great Britain in the pipeline, something that will be eagerly anticipated by most birders.”—Mike Pennington, British Birds

“The introductory pages clearly state the purpose of the book: to make the reader a better birder. As I first paged through the scenes, one of my initial thoughts was that this is more like a study book for birders, rather than a traditional guide to be used in the field. . . . The scenes themselves are a pleasure to study. The photographs . . . are arranged to show as many different plumages and positions for each species as possible. Birds are shown in flight, swimming, perching, hunting, socializing, feeding, preening, even mating. . . . I give The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds 5 Goldfinches out of 5.”—Amy Evenstad, Magnificent Frigatebird Blog

“[The Crossley ID Guide] isn’t a ‘field guide’ so much as an at home reference, or a learning guide. Looking more into it and thinking back to my early days I realized this is the perfect guide to give someone that is going to get into birding. . . . Seeing pictures and poses that you will actually see of these birds adds a new dimension to the bird guide book.”—Tim Avery, Utah Birders