PixlBit

Make me.

Puffins are way cool. One of these days I need to take one of the bird cruises out to Eastern Egg Rock where they nest.

I had that Miami Vice soundtrack.

I'll post a pic of my field guides and other natural history books on your FB wall sometime. They take up not one but two shelves, and the collection is always growing.

Bugs - the real reason I could never live in the South, lol. I'm a little confused as to what a puffer bird is, though. Did you mean puffin?

Some of my favorite movies in 1990 were Dances With Wolves, Die Hard 2, Arachnophobia, and Hunt for Red October. I have no idea what I was listening to at the time, and I wasn't gaming much at that time in my life.

It's my ranger background 

The only issue with the "local" books is that frequently the ID pics aren't very useful. I'd recommend either the Golden Guide or the Kaufman for a beginner, and use the local one to help narrow things down from there.

They're wild creatures, and that male was really old, by osprey standards. I saw a photo of him that a park visitor with amazing camera gear took of him before he disappeared, and he wasn't looking so good then.

Have you decided on what book you're getting? I'm partial to the Golden Guides bird book myself, but a friend prefers the Kaufman guide. Sibley's is good, but suffers from too much information for the beginning birder. Peterson's is split up into Eastern and Western birds and is pretty good (I have both, as well as a really old Golden Guide), but you have to flip back and forth between picture and range map, which is kind of a pain. Audobon has pretty pictures, but is kind of sucky for ID purposes. If you want to go high tech, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website is excellent (thank you, KnightDriver!), and has a free bird ID app you can download for smart phones that is apparently pretty accurate. And if you want to be AZ specific, the Arizona Traveler Guidebooks series has a Birds of Arizona booklet that I bought about 25 years ago for about $5. I also got one for wildflowers.

That sounds like an awful lot of work! Glad you're having fun, though.