Victor Carpenter · Field handbooks for North American yards

Know what you saw.

Not what you wish it meant.

Two illustrated handbooks on what the birds in your yard are actually doing — what the evidence can show, what it cannot, and how to keep them safe.

Four books · the whole yard

What Your Backyard Birds Are Telling You

153 pages · 25 chapters · + 3 free species guides

The main edition, organised by the questions people actually have rather than by species. It teaches a method first — keeping what you saw separate from what you concluded — then applies it to everything that happens in a yard.

Fourteen common behaviours, decoded one by one
What a bird can genuinely remember about you
Night, deep cold, the storm hour, the heat wave
Why a familiar bird stops coming
Cardinals, grief and meaning — handled carefully
Windows, cats, hawks and feeder hygiene
Free guides to the hummingbird, cardinal and blue jay

$12.90 · 255 pages in total

Buy now → Read more

PDF and EPUB · instant download · 30-day refund

New · one bird, completely

The Hummingbird Year

141 pages · 40 chapters · 33 original plates

Everything that happens in a hummingbird yard, from the first male at an empty feeder in March to the last straggler in October. The book that answers the questions an identification guide and a gardening book both skip.

Why they stopped coming — ranked, migration last
Fifteen species, and the mark that separates each lookalike
The nectar rules, the ant moat, the wasps, the bully
Plants for seven regions, and a bloom calendar with no gaps
Arrival dates, the nest, the Gulf crossing, winter feeding
The praying mantis, and the bird trapped in your garage

$12.90 · PDF and EPUB

Buy now → Read more

PDF and EPUB · instant download · 30-day refund

If you are not sure

Which one should you start with?

If this is you	Start here
Your hummingbirds stopped coming	The Hummingbird Year
A cardinal is attacking your window	What Your Backyard Birds — the cardinal guide is included
You want to know what any bird in the yard is doing	What Your Backyard Birds Are Telling You
You want to plant a garden hummingbirds will hold in	The Hummingbird Year
A bird you knew for years stopped coming	What Your Backyard Birds — there is a full chapter on it
You cannot tell your western hummingbirds apart	The Hummingbird Year — fifteen species, one page each
You want both	Buy either one; the other is linked inside

How both books are written

Every number has a source. Where the science is thin, it says so on the page.

Most backyard bird content repeats the same handful of numbers without checking them. These books checked them — and where a widely quoted figure did not survive checking, they name it and explain why.

Crows are said to remember a face for five years; the peer-reviewed figure is 2.7. The famous hummingbird heart rate belongs to a different species than the one it is usually attached to. A full feeder does not delay migration. All three are corrected, with the references attached.

294Pages across both

65Chapters

63Original plates

5Books in total

Included free with the main edition

Three species guides, for the birds people ask about most

Every chapter in them answers something a real person asked in a comment section — usually more than once.

**The Hummingbird at Your Window**32 pages · ten questions

**The Cardinal on Your Fence**35 pages · twelve questions

**The Blue Jay They Call a Bully**35 pages · twelve questions

Get all four — $12.90

The author

“I read every comment. These books came out of them.”

I have watched the same handful of birds come back to the same yard for years. My channel runs on close observation, and the question I get more than any other is some version of: my bird stopped coming — does that mean something?

I don’t have a tidy answer to that, and these books don’t pretend to. What I have is a method for separating what I watched from what I want it to mean, and for making the yard a little safer for whatever shows up next.

— Victor Carpenter · bird observer, United States