Less Than A Penny

While shopping at our local market a few days ago, we came across an entire section of field guides put out by Lone Pine Publishing. My son started grabbing books off the rack and shoving them into our hands and the shopping cart.

He knows we rarely say no to buying him books but a quick look at the price made me gasp. Here we stood with 8 or 9 books in our hands and not one of them was under $20. Now, I’m all for expanding the mind and encouraging my son to read but I wasn’t prepared to spend over $200 on reference material that I knew for a fact wouldn’t get used more than a few times a year.

The books themselves were impressive. Several of the paperback books were made with textured covers, so they should wear and travel really well. My son really likes the pocket size Animal Tracks of Northern California Field Guide; it is very portable and provides images of what to look for and plenty of clues to assist you in tracking your favorite animal.

Below is a list of the books we purchased and their price on Amazon.

• Mammals of California by Tamara Eder ($15.61)
• Bugs of Northern California by John Acorn ($11.21)
• Birds of Northern California by David Fix ($14.93)
• Squirrels of the West by Tamara Hartson (9.31)
• Animal Tracks of Northern California (Animal Tracks Guides) by Ian Sheldon ($7.95)

While I wouldn't call these books cheap by any stretch, purchasing them from Amazon does provide a significant savings. Our local store had them really marked up high. You can purchase them directly from Lone Pine but their prices were higher than Amazon's, so we simply used their site as a guide, finding the books we were interested in, then searching for them on Amazon. We found only one book we wanted that wasn't available on Amazon.

To be perfectly honest, most of the information in these books can be found totally free on the Internet, the problem is printing out an entire field can get costly very quickly. By the time you factor in your ink costs, wear on your printer and don't forget the paper, buying field guides for subjects that really interest your child is a very good investment. The best part is they travel well.

If you purchase a couple at a time (spending at least $25.00, shipping is free and these books make terrific gifts for just about any occasion.

Just for good measure we also ordered a copy of California Hiking - The Complete Guide to More Than 1,000 Hikes, published by Foghorn Outdoors ($14.93), in the hopes that it will enspire us to actually get some use out of all those filed guides.

To make carting everything around, we've enlisted the help of several clear plastic bins. The bins come in assorted sizes and we prefer the clear ones because it makes it easy to find things at a glance. The back of our Subaru has several. We have a medium sized plastic toolbox that serves as a first-aid kit, with all the essentials, including a disposable camera.

We also have a large clear plastic bin that contains our camera equipment, field guides, tripod, maginifying glass, notepads and pencils. We add to the bin or remove things depending on where we are going. If we are going to the lake, we add towels and water socks. A trip to the mountains might require hiking boots. The bins are easy to remove when not needed and they keep things neat and organized.

Every trip you make can be an adventure. It's up to you.

Find Free Field Guides

• Field Guides - Search more than 5,500 species
• American Field Guide - A collection of over 1400 video clips that enable you to experience America's wilderness firsthand
• Wildflower Field Guide - by DesertUSA Magazine
• Field Guide for the Californias - by San Diego Natural History Museum Field Guide
• Field Guide to Freshwater Invertebrates - by Leska S. Fore
• Field Guide to Common Texas Insects - Entomology by Texas A&M University

Labels: field guides, first-aid kit, hiking, plastic bins