false 6376401 037541519X 9780375415197 19 6 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255789324m/6376401.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6376401-the-sibley-guide-to-trees 9798 David Allen Sibley 535 88 3 1 false Sun Oct 25 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 25 23:34:02 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 25 23:49:41 -0700 2009 Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region. One major problem is a lack of any kind of preview or index system. Sibley's bird guides begin each family or major group with a grid of all the species contained therein, which is pretty useful for giving the whole group a glance and picking out the bird you've got in your binocs, and when this fails those guides are still pretty flippable: go somewhere close to the bird you're looking at (passerines, divers, raptors, etc), start flipping, and you'll see something similar. It's much harder to do this for trees, given their highly variable appearance, so it's hard to narrow down possibilities. Sure it's a pine but... this is the west. There are a lot of pines. Many practical tidbits seem to be lacking as well, like the "hairy armpits" where the veins fork on the underside of a coast live oak leaf, or the way a juniper's berries smell like gin when crushed.

Overall, I think this is a great home reference, but I'll stick to keys in the field.]]>