The 8 Best North American Field Guides (2023 reviews)

Are you planning to buy north american field guides, and are you confused about the options ? Your search ends here.

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Our Top Picks:

Best Overall: Buy: Roger Tory Peterson North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best For New mushroom hunters: Buy: National Audubon Society North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best For beginner: Buy: Ida Thompson North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best Bird Field Guide: Buy: UDVARDY North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best For An outdoors person: Buy: Fiona Reid North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best For home cooking ideas: Buy: Thomas Elias North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best For edibles: Buy: Orson Miller North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best little Guide: Buy: Casey Mcfarland North American Field Guide READ REVIEW

Best Overall: Roger Tory Peterson North American Field Guide

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If you often find yourself scrambling for good guide, roger tory peterson north american field guide should be your first option for buying. This Bird Book is very useful as a Bird watcher go to. It combines the Eastern and Western North America guides into one volume, and adds the bonus of birds in the Hawaiian Islands. It is the same map as the one for broad-billed hummingbird. It allows the book to lie flat.

This mature guide is easy to use and to see the most important field marks on all the birds of North America. It is made with quality material. There are a few places where it modernizes species classifications and names. This is the best bird book around.

• Terrific for beginners and experienced alike
• Great descriptions with excellent explanations to distinguish closely related birds
• More propping open a book while look through the binoculars
• A must have for any casual watcher/researcher

Best For New mushroom hunters: National Audubon Society North American Field Guide

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Next on the list, we've got yet another guide that manages to win our hearts. It's the national audubon society north american field guide and it's widely considered as guide that has the most suitable features. These Audubon books are great and give you lots of information and great pictures. They can have so many different appearances at different stages of growth. It features bright color photos of almost every mushroom mentioned in the guidebook. The beginner is best served with a simple field guide to the more common species, while the serious amateur will eventually pick up a copy of Arora’s Mushrooms Demystified, an encyclopedic guide to over 2, 000 species. It's lacking a lot of photos, and the pages are extremely lightweight and thin.

This is absolutely the finest book available to have with you in the field. The Stunning and accurate photography, a decent spore print chart, and a comprehensive introduction make this guide a must-have for the wild mushroom enthusiast. It is perfect for your day pack or tote bag.

• A must have for anyone serious about mushrooms
• Very comprehensive, easy to use mushroom guide
• A good companion for traveling and identifying wild mushrooms

Best For beginner: Ida Thompson North American Field Guide

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The ida thompson north american field guide gives the top-tier guide a run for their money by offering flagship specs at a much more affordable price. This guide has the standard nas water repellant jacket and quick abridgment icons. It provides lists of geological survey offices and major fossil collections, a geological time chart, and a guide to collecting and preserving fossils. It has great information about geologic time and where to look for fossils. It has respectable coverage of invertebrate fossils with over 400 entries.

This is a great reference for any fossil collector, however, if you are more interested in detailed information and photographs about fossils of plants, reptiles, fish, and mammals this book will disapoint with its lack of information. The guide helps you find the most common and to surmise what you have found by those examples.

• Helps explain the proper way to store and sort fossils
• Good brand reputation

Best Bird Field Guide: UDVARDY North American Field Guide

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Udvardy offers a variety of guide for personal choice and yet maintaining quality in all the variants. The Smithsonian guide to north american birds uses photographs rather than the painted profiles and includes a cd of bird song as well. It provides numerous color plates (painted) of each species with additional angles of view (flying and standing) that help to see the bird from other positions. It includes information on its voice, habitat, nesting habits and eggs, and range.

Each of the many birds included has a range map and very brief description of color, voice, habitat, and nesting behavior. The cover is of a flexible plastic that is protective of the text and appears durable. It fits nicely in a field bag. There's even a tiny map of North America with its range shaded in gray. There is a pre-photo index of silhouettes, and thumbprint-sized silhouettes are also featured on the center edge of the photo pages for quick-flipping reference.

• Great book for enthusiasts and beginners
• Easy to thumb through pictures and then go to text reference pages
• New and hot release

Best For An outdoors person: Fiona Reid North American Field Guide

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Best part: fiona reid north american field guide costs comparatively low and it is available to ship in 24 hours. An especially useful addition to this field guide is the extensive series of skull plates. This makes for a very thick book that does not lie flat easily, and requires lots of page turning. It has some nice animal habitat maps.

This guide is very handsome, logical in its chapters and complete but not exchaustive in its information. These are omnivorous, consuming large amounts of fruit when available. They have drawings, actual photos and good write ups. The third section has detailed descriptions and range maps for each species. They are put together nicely, making it easy to find what your looking for. It is very useful for the small differences in similar mammals.

• Edible wild plants, insects, reptile and amphibians, and mammals
• Clear illustrations, concise wording and fits in a pocket
• New and hot release

Best For home cooking ideas: Thomas Elias North American Field Guide

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Compared with other guide in this category, the thomas elias north american field guide has a convenient design. This is the best plant food identification book out there and any self respecting prepper should have this in their library to get familiar with ways to collect more food. It features color photos almost exclusively, and each entry has the common name, scientific name, region of proliferation, as well as preperation and foraging tips. It will tell you what plants to eat, what to harvest off of them and then how to prepare them.

This book is in fact a very good guide to anyone serious about utilizing the natrual bounty to augment a garden or grocery store. It is great for backwood camping and backpacking or even desert hiking. It will be good to know for foraging for food and medicinal plants, herbs and flowers. The key and the way it is grouped by season and geographic location make it easy to use and reference.

• Excellent resource for identifying and locating herbs for your region
• Excellent sample guide for foraging north american wild plants
• Informs on identification, collection, and preperation for cooking

Best For edibles: Orson Miller North American Field Guide

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Orson Miller offers a variety of guide for personal choice and yet maintaining quality in all the variants. It is extremely important to know your mushrooms when collecting for consumption in the wild. Though it contains only 180 species of mushrooms across North America, it is still a great field guide for the beginner. This book is quite comprehensive dealing with mushrooms. It includes great color photographs of every mushroom covered through the Arora books.

This mushroom guide could use better photographs but it is still the best one out there for hunters and identification. There is a high reliance on keys, but keys only apply to the species in the guidebook, which is probably less than 20% of the reasonably common species at any particular location—that’s true of any guidebook. The photos are good, and the reproduction (print) quality is high. This book is great for the beginner.

• Has many good quality pictures with the fact and comments equally as defining
• Easy to navigate and make identifications
• Lot of satisfied buyers

Best little Guide: Casey Mcfarland North American Field Guide

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The casey mcfarland north american field guide is satisfactory and appropriate and fits well with your daily purpose. If you’ve ever found an egg or a bird nest or interested in birds, get this book. It’s a nice book to have to identify nests if you find one without the bird nearby. This book is not only amazingly beautiful and well-organized, but it's also an impressive piece of scholarship and research by the authors. It includes wonderful descriptions and all kinds of information about birds and bird behavior.

This book is a must-have for any naturalist, educator, birder, outdoor enthusiast or bird-curious folk. Apart from being an amazing reference for identification, it’s also full of excellent information on evolution, behavior, etc. It is possible to find nests of practically every species. The photos are beautiful in the writing as well crafted. One additional feature of this book are the extra photos of nests taken from below or from the side.

• Very well organized and easy to use
• Well researched, well written, well organized, and well, awesome
• Very complete accounts of each species' nest
• Long-awaited, very thorough and impressive treatment of the subject