It was almost two years ago to the day when today’s guest, Joan Strassmann, last visited me on the show, right around the time her book “Slow Birding” was released. Now, as then, I’ve seen what are pretty much my last migrant warblers of the year move through the garden, and am wondering how long I get to look at the garden’s masses of winterberry hollies before the robins and cedar waxwings have at them … and whether the black bears will let me put up the bird feeders as early as Thanksgiving this year or not without a run-in. 

Joan is back to talk about her newest book, a companion to the first, called “The Slow Birding Journal: A Field Guide for Watching Birds Wherever You Are.” She is the author of “Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard,” an animal behaviorist, and a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis. 

As the titles of both books encourage us to do, Joan advocates for really emphasizing the “watching” in bird watching, not just ticking off names of who you see like it’s a competition where the one with the longest list wins, but trying to see what they are doing, and what inferences you can draw from their behaviors.  

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