Written by a secular humanist with an agenda. In the intro, he wrote this: "Birding is a profoundly humanistic enterprise. And on that note, I cannot help but think of Socrate's exquisite distillation of what it means to be human: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' Birding, ultimately, is about self-discovery and self-awareness, about apprehending and celebrating the experience of being alive in this world today." He takes multiple shots at creationists (without, of course, any explanation of why his evolutionist view makes more sense), accepts global warming and ascribes all sorts of (secular) human values and morals to birds.

Apart from the agenda, his device of using various birds to delve into various topics gets old by about the third page. There was the very occasional, almost accidental bit of useful information, but I had to read through a lot of dull and arrogant slop to find it.