Parking Lot Birding: A Fun Guide to Discovering Birds in Texas (Volume 60) (W. L. Moody Jr. Natural History Series)

I have a bird feeder and thought that was as far as my "birding" skills or interests went, but this book inspired me to open my eyes to other possibilities. I don't think I'll ever start taking birding trips for that purpose alone, but after reading this I'm definitely seeing more birds everywhere I go. I was really happily surprised by how fun it was to read, too - she has a very engaging writing style and makes birding less geeky-seeming and more interesting. Highly recommended for all of us going mad under quarantine and looking for something interesting to do from a distance!

Good introduction by community...left out a lot of major birding places in Texas...not everything in a local city....good book for rank beginners...birders will know all this stuff.

New to Dallas area, thought there would be more details per regions of the state

We bought this wonderful, informative and fun to read book to better understand the natural world right outside our door. We love going to Texas parks and this book will travel with us as we go.

List of birds for various parks. Not very intesting.

Rarely has a book’s title seemed more timely. Birding close to home, usually just a virtuous ideal, has become a requirement, and frustrating as it can be, these months of semi-quarantine have opened our eyes to some of the phenomena going on in our own back yards—and in the parking lots we would otherwise never think to linger in. Jennifer Bristol, the former coordinator of Texas’s statewide Children in Nature program, wrote her new “fun guide” without ever dreaming that it would ultimately appear in the midst of such dire circumstances. Her goal, she explains, was simply to reassure birders, visiting and resident alike, how surprisingly accessible many of the wonders of Texas wildlife watching can be. Instead of elaborate and rigorous expeditions into the wilds, a quick and simple visit to an urban nature trail, a boardwalk, or yes, even a parking lot can be an experience every bit as eye-opening as a full day’s hike in the mountains or a long day’s drive across the prairies. It is an inspiring idea, especially for those of us who live far from anything like “the wilds” and for those of us whose days on the trail to Boot Springs are far in the past. Bristol is overly ambitious in trying to demonstrate the concept over the entire massive state of Texas in just 200 pages, but those pages introduce us to municipal parks, city nature trails, and sewage plants that otherwise only the resident birder will ever have heard of. Even a non-birding visit to Houston, Dallas, Midland, San Antonio, or any other of the huge cities and small towns treated here will be much more pleasant now that we’ve been let in on the locals’ secrets. Less helpfully, Bristol devotes considerable space to some of North America’s most famous, most heavily visited birding sites, several of which fit only with difficulty into the concept of “parking lot” birding. I would rather have seen pages with quick discussions of another half dozen Houston city parks than be reminded again of the considerable glories of High Island or Anahuac, and Bentsen, Laguna Atascosa, and Santa Ana could surely have relinquished their print space to a selection of smaller, far less well-known localities right in the growing cities of the Rio Grande Valley. A closer adherence to the author’s starting principle—privileging compact sites, urban sites, readily accessible sites—would both have made the book more useful and positioned it more clearly as an alternative to more comprehensive, less carefully focused bird-finding guides. Parking Lot Birding mixes anecdote and “hard” information in winningly written prose. Some readers may wish for more, and more detailed, maps, especially given Bristol’s salutary reminder that there are still, horribile dictu, gaps in cell phone coverage in some parts of Texas. Most of the photographs illustrating the site accounts are large and appealing; unfortunately, there are several misidentifications in the captions. Of course Jennifer Bristol’s book will be a handy aid for visitors to urban Texas, but for most readers, it may be more important as a model suggesting what a bird-finding guide could look like for an area where most of the best birding sites are small, urban, and inconspicuous.

I picked this book up as a companion piece to my Texas travels - organized by region, it provides an easy go-to-reference guide for nearby birding hot spots throughout the state. The color photography contributes greatly to my enjoyment of the book: as a new birder, I found the photos helpful and inspiring - encouraging me to seek out some of these magnificent birds that I had not witnessed personally. The ‘Feather Fact’ sections are also worth mentioning: enriching details on specific birds that include habitats, migration patterns and calls. I recommend this book as an accessible and fun way to enjoy both the great state of Texas and its abundant wildlife.

The fact that renowned author Richard Louv wrote the forward to this book speaks volumes. It is well-written, informative, and authentic. I never realized how accessible so many varieties of birds were simply by parking the car and rolling down the window or taking an easy walk down a path. I thought birding required expensive binoculars, khaki-colored vests with multiple pockets and those fancy apps to record their songs. I've become a birder simply by reading this book and learning that if I just pull the car over there is a migratory world right there for me to discover. There are 90 locations described in this book and I'm excited to check them off my newly-formed list.