Afield: Forty Years of Birding the American West

For forty years, Alan Contreras has studied birds and natural history in the West. In Afield, he recounts his bird-watching experiencesa primarily in Oregon, but also in Alaska, Arizona, California, and Texas. Sprinkled with comments made by ornithologists and early explorers of the West, his essays offer elements of natural history, personal memoir, and adventure travel. In the largest sense, Afield is a love story, reaffirming the practice of unhurried observation of nature. It is a chron...