This guide teaches birders to use the characteristics of wing types and feather morphology to identify feathers--not only by species but also by their place on the bird's body.

The introductory chapters give a detailed overview of the feather--how feathers developed, the parts of a single feather, and the variety of types of feathers on a bird. In the feather identification section, more than 400 color photographs show feather samples from 379 bird species from all over North America. Along with the wing type of the species and a map showing its range, several types of feathers are included for each bird; each feather is labeled with its type and its size.