Book Review: The Breeding Birds of Minnesota (Pfannmuller, Niemi, and Green)

A magnificent tour de force

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In 2017, when my daughter Katherine was tweaking my website, I asked her to add a new feature to my species pages: a link, for every bird that breeds in Minnesota, to that species’ entry on the Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas website. (For example, here’s the species page for the Red-eyed Vireo.) Over 700 volunteers (including me to a very small extent) and professionals (including my son Tom) conducted the Atlas, a statewide, four-year comprehensive search for breeding birds, running from 2009 to 2013. The resulting website is an incredible resource that I use a lot.

For every one of the 249 species known to ever have bred in the wild in Minnesota, the website includes an astonishing wealth of information: very basic life history information, a map of the breeding distribution over the US and Canada, a much more detailed map of the breeding distribution in Minnesota, and a thorough discussion of the habitat needs and the bird’s distribution and abundance in the state historically through today. For having such an abundance of valuable information, the website is also beautiful and easy to navigate.

Now, Lee Pfannmuller, Gerald Niemi, and Janet Green have done themselves one better—they’ve put all this information, and much more, into a book, The Breeding Birds of Minnesota: History, Ecology, and Conservation, a beautiful, useful, and engagingly written tour de force, with much more information, even more beautifully presented, than the website.

Every species is given a minimum of two pages, with 24 species of special conservation need, such as Trumpeter Swan, Piping Plover, Evening Grosbeak, and Golden-winged Warbler, getting three or four full pages, all laid out to make the book as inviting and appealing to our eyes as it is to our minds and hearts.

And to heighten our reading pleasure, the designers made those two-page entries on facing pages. Opening the book at random, a reader sees a beautiful two-page spread all about a single bird, with quick facts for those who just are just glancing through and plenty of substance for those who want more.

When any author tries to provide valuable information for professionals, who want citations and a nuanced presentation of complex issues; avid bird lovers, who want fascinating facts presented in a fun and interesting way; and people who simply want to learn a little more about their backyard birds, the resulting book seldom hits the mark. Somehow, this book does it all.

The authors dug deep into historical data, consulted with and used information from scientists from the past and present who have done lots of work on Minnesota nesting birds, and pieced it all together with the Breeding Bird Atlas data, somehow fashioning out of this past and current information a book focused on the future, including potential impacts from climate change and helpful suggestions for what must be done to protect these birds we love.

The dedication page of The Breeding Birds of Minnesota begins, “This book is for the long-term survival and conservation of Minnesota birds and for anyone with a desire to know something about them.” Perhaps that is why it so resonates with me—that pretty much sums up what I’ve tried to do my entire career. Every species entry in The Breeding Birds of Minnesota gives the reader good reasons to love that bird as well as explaining what it needs if it is to endure.

The Breeding Birds of Minnesota is huge: 11 1/4 inches square, 616 pages of high-quality, acid-free, heavy paper. That means it’s a little too big to comfortably lug off the shelf every time you want to look up a cool bird, but that’s okay—this is the perfect “coffee table book”—one to savor whenever you or a guest wants to thumb through something beautiful and inspiring as well as a book you’ll want to hunker down and read more fully. I don’t have a coffee table in my home office, but I cleared the top of my file cabinets, at desk height, just so The Breeding Birds of Minnesota will be right there any time I need. I expect to spend a lot of time with it.