This book chronicles the high adventures of one of America's most dedicated bird watchers and environmentalists. What Herbert Krause brings to telling the stories of the birds of the Great Plains is his love of the rich variety of wildlife here-- expecially its sheer profusion-- and his novelist's ability to give every individial bird he visits its own character and personality.
Krause introduces us to a great many of his bird friends in these pages, sometimes passing acquaintances, like the song sparrows he watches at their play or the fall and winter birds whom he admires for their hardiness and their unfathomable patterns of migration, like the congregations of geese who range from as far south as the Gulf Coast in winter to the farthest reaches of Canada.
The greater part of Birding in the Northern Plains is given over to individual birds-- the cardinal, the Canada warbler, the McCown's longspur, the bald eagle, and then a series of forty-four short articles, most of them printed in Bird Notes, the publication of the South Dakota Ornithologists' Union. Krause believed passionately in the Union's mission-- to support the cause of disappearing wildlife, 'wildlife which is threatened not only here but the world over, a global problem of which the Great Plains too is inevitably a part!'