Bird watching can be fascinating and fun, but to get a lot out of it, you need more than a pair of binoculars. But with so many guides competing for your attention, it can be tough to know which books are best. Here are one avid birder's top picks for amateur ornithologists in New Jersey.

Every birder has a go-to field guide, a dog-eared, note-filled book trusted above all others. For me, and for many other birders I know, it’s the Sibley Guide to Birds. My more compact Sibley Guide to Birds of Eastern North America has traveled with me on a boat trip 60 miles off the New Jersey coast, been stuffed into the seat pocket in front of me on countless flights and ridden with me across the U.S. in the back seat of my car.

David Allen Sibley spent 12 years working on his guide after finding others didn’t go far enough in depicting the females and juveniles, and his book has become the standard for many because it’s so comprehensive. It’s also illustrated, which might seem counterintuitive. Wouldn’t it be easier to identify a bird from a photograph? Not necessarily, it turns out.

Photographs introduce all kinds of variables, like light differences and background images. And there’s so much variation even within bird species that any one individual might look quite different from what we call the “average” of that species. An illustrator who has spent a lifetime watching birds can capture that average with pen, ink and watercolor better than anybody can with a camera.

Another advantage is that unlike guides with a section of photo plates, Sibley has the species information – range, description, size and more – right next to the image.

All that said, it’s not a bad idea to have a quality photo guide on hand for comparison. The always-reliable National Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds is a good bet, with consistently sharp, beautiful, representative images. 

Field guides only have so much information on each bird, and with good reason. Nobody wants to lug around pounds of paper in the field. But if you want to know more about what you spot in the wild, add The Birder’s Handbook to your shelf.

This essential tome combines 650 species “treatments” – detailed information on habitat, feeding habits, nest shape and more – with meticulously researched and referenced essays on bird behavior and natural history. Peruse it for a while, and you’ll find yourself getting sucked into explanations of why New Guinea has so many more bird species than the island of Bali and the physiological explanation for how songbirds can manage to sing two notes at once. 

Another good book for your home collection is the National Geographic Reference Atlas to the Birds of North America, which combines illustrations, photographs, maps and essays into one hefty and easy-to-use manual.

For a successful bird watching outing, it helps to get local with your literature. A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey is a well-loved reference by William J. Boyle, Jr., a chemist and avid Garden State birder who long served as editor for the respected periodical American Birds. Boyle’s book details more than 130 key birding spots, with maps and explanations on what to expect to see when.

Bird Studies at Old Cape May is a classic, a massive collection of observations of New Jersey’s coastal birds penned in the early 20^th century by ornithologist Witmer Stone in 1965. The text might be dated, but the observations are keen, and it’s fascinating to look back through the decades at Stone’s descriptions and statistics.