This week’s “featured creature” is the California Chipmunk, a member of the squirrel family. This particular species is normally found — you guessed it! — in California and and some Mexican states. Some chipmunks in captivity have lived up to nine years, but their life expectancy is around 3 years in the wild.

Chipmunks are known for their cuteness, and have played some starring roles in animated films — does anyone remember the original “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movie?

For more information, check out our nifty Mammals of North America App, now available for iPhone and Android!

Previous Mammals Monday posts:

the American badger

the harp seal

the black bear

the chipmunk

the blue whale

the reindeer

Think Christmas, Hannukah, and New Year’s Eve are enough to celebrate in December? Here’s one more family and friends get-together to add to the list — the Christmas Bird Count. I am a new birder and this is the first year I have been aware of the CBC so I asked Richard Crossley if he would answer a few questions. Read on to learn more about the CBC and how Richard’s count went this year.

Richard will be on Science Friday this week to discuss the CBC with host Ira Flatow and a nation-wide NPR audience. Check local your local NPR affiliate for the air time and tune in.

Richard, at this time of year we start hearing about the Christmas Bird Count. What is it?
The National Audubon started the CBC in 1900 in New York (Central Park I believe). The first one for my backyard, Cape May, was only 3 years later in 1903. It sounds amazingly simple, but the goal of the program is to have tens of thousands of volunteers literally count birds around Christmas time. For many this has now become an annual family tradition spanning many generations.

Do you have a sense of how many people participate in the CBC?
Well last year there were over 2200 groups reporting in and they saw over 60 million birds according to National Audubon. This year, the counts will take place until Jan 5th. Our patch, Cape May County, did ours on Sunday. There were 62 participants and we counted 152 species. The best birds I had were Rufous Hummingbird and Bells Vireo – both lingering rarities.

Is the CBC purely a collaborative venture or do teams compete with each other to find the most species?
More available after the jump.

Richard is still hard at work on the upcoming Western version of The Crossley ID Guide. In the meantime, enjoy his video of Colombia Tanagers and other Western species coming in to feed on bananas. Listen carefully as he IDs a young male that his companions previously thought was a female. This type of ID — using transitional plumage — is where The Crossley ID Guide is absolutely invaluable. Richard’s photo spreads include more plumages, more specimens, more of everything to make difficult IDs easier.

Also, if you are a fan of NPR’s Science Friday, tune in this week to hear Richard discuss the Christmas Bird Count.

This week’s “featured creature” from the Mammals of North America App is the Ursus americanus — also known as the American black bear. These bears can be seen throughout the U.S., and are commonly found in forested areas away from human settlements.

Fun fact: A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh was named after a black bear named Winnipeg, who lived at the London Zoo from 1915 to 1934. This image shows Winnie with her owner, Lt. Harry Colebourne.

Check out our other Mammals Monday posts:
the chipmunk

the blue whale

the reindeer

Hint — it is one of the Wizard of Oz trifecta…

Click through for the answer and to access a wonderful interview with one of the leading carnivore conservation voices in the world (and coincidentally PUP author), Luke Hunter.

The Crossley ID Guide has terrific visuals — exactly the kind of thing that appeals to kids (of all ages, I’d argue, but in this case, of the younger ages). Check out Fisher’s spot-on IDs of the owls in the Crossley ID Guide in this video.

As we gear up for the holiday season, this  week’s mammal from the popular Mammals of North America App is the Caribou — also known as a reindeer! Caribou are found in Northern sub-polar regions including Canada and parts of Alaska, though they are endangered in certain areas.

Fun facts: The earliest fossil evidence of caribou comes from Germany and has been dated to about 440,000 years ago! Caribou are also the only species of deer where both sexes have antlers.

Check out some of the previous “Mammals Monday” posts:

the chipmunk

the blue whale

This week’s featured mammal from the Mammals of North America app is the Eastern Chipmunk. As the weather gets colder, you might see chipmunks collecting food to store for the winter in their extensive underground burrows — these burrows can be up to 3.5 metres long, and often have multiple entrances.

Fun fact: a chipmunk is a kind of squirrel!

Mammals Monday is back! Tune in every week for a screenshot from our exciting new app, Mammals of North America. The app, available for Android and iPhone, is an essential field guide to the land and marine mammals of the USA and Canada.

This week’s featured mammal is the balaenoptera musculus, also known as the Blue Whale. Blue whales are a protected species, and can be found in the Gulf of Maine, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and off the coast of Southern California.

Fun fact: Blue whales can live to be over 80 years old!

Well, at least that’s what a self-serving bird book publicist might say.

A friend forwarded an announcement for the new My Bird World app for iPad. It costs 4.99 and features interactive games that help children (or even novice adult birders) learn basic information about hummingbirds, American goldfinches, sandpipers, and 21 other birds. The app was created using data, photos, and sounds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which is the leading birding research facility in the States so you know the content is spot-on. I downloaded it last night and managed to unlock two birds by matching trivia and speed-feeding the right foods to the right birds.

My Bird World is a fun way to engage younger birders and the perfect gateway into the world of birding (and hopefully to the broader natural world, too). For kids intrigued by the game, the perfect next step will be a good identification guide that is also built around the way kids learn. The Crossley ID Guide with its layered photo plates appeals to younger readers comfortable in a photo-shopped world and provides them with just enough information to spur their own observations of unlabeled birds in the book. At the events I’ve attended with Richard Crossley, children are almost universally interested in this book — drawn to its highly visual layout and the “Where’s Waldo”-esque tiny birds in the background.

So a thumb’s up for My Bird World and its attempt to get a younger audience engaged in bird watching.

Could this really work? Next spring, Mark Berres, a University of Wisconsin–Madison ornithologist, will release an app called WeBird that identifies birds by call. I can’t wait to give it a try in my backyard! In the meantime, though, studying id books seems to be the way to go, so check out our full catalog of bird books here: http://press.princeton.edu/birds/.

Then go read this notice from the illustrator H. Douglas Pratt. He is hard at work on a new edition for 2013 or 2014, but needs additional resources. If you sponsor one of the illustrations for the book, you will receive the original artwork after the book publishes — this is an amazing opportunity to own a one-of-a-kind painting from one of the leading bird illustrators in the world and also contribute to a new edition of a now classic and revered text.

Want to see samples of the paintings from the earlier version of the book — click here.