You saw that bird where?

Back in the day of the Pleistocene when I was a child in such alluring destinations as Omaha, and Burlingame, Calif., and Des Moines, there never appeared to me to be any birds particularly worthy of watching in person. (Come to think of it, I cannot even recall the Teratornis incredibilis with its 16-foot wingspan.) Birds existed, they were brown, they ate worms, there were seagulls present the day we went to the beach. But birds to go looking for? Who did that? When I was technically a grown-up, I found myself in Hawaii for almost a year, and on a visit to the Big Island, wandering through a sort of woodland, looking up at where my friend’s boyfriend was pointing: little tiny spots of color high in the not-too-leafy trees. (His first love was beetles; the Bishop Museum’s collection in Honolulu – talk about color, and they are immobilized for eternity – is worth the flight.) The sun was in its sky, birds were in the trees; this did not compare to lava oozing at your feet. Even in paradise, my narrow mind did not admit to a cult of people purposely going somewhere for the sole reason of wanting to see a bird, certainly not any farther than Hawaii was from Oahu.

None are so blind, yes.

“Fifty Places to Go Birding Before You Die” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 224 pp., hardcover, $24.95) is the latest in the “Fifty Places” series created by Chris Santella. In this volume (which you could well work into an itinerary with its predecessors “Fifty Places to [Play Golf, Fly Fish, Sail] Before You Die,” Santella has enlisted birders, conservationists, ornithologists, and academics to comment on sites they love or to which they are particularly connected.

Wayne R. Petersen of Mass. Audubon tells of his childhood fascination with birds (“By the time I was in fifth grade, I was hooked”) and his first trip to Monomoy to wander, field guide and binoculars in hand, observing the thousands of shorebirds. Victor Emanuel (birders will recognize many of the specialists’ names) describes remote and famous South Georgia Island (U.K.), 1,300 miles east of Tierra del Fuego, and its variety of species well beyond penguins and albatross in a setting made famous by Ernest Shackleton. Peter Marra’s description of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains and Cockpit Country and Marshall’s Pen nature reserve might be enough to provoke someone out of her chaise longue and into the countryside. Here are Florida, California, Maine, Pennsylvania (you’re going to be there canvassing anyway, why not get to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, near Allentown), Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, Borneo, Mexico, Madagascar, Kauai – all unsurprising places in such a book as this, each with a beautiful photograph alongside. But the places a certain kind of birdbrain doesn’t expect are as exotic: Hungary, with its Hortobagy National Park on the Great Hungarian Plain, where one might see a great bustard, among the heaviest birds capable of flight; Greenland with its gyrefalcons and murres; Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York, super-rich with species and right next to JFK International Airport; Iceland, to which there are no birds endemic and only seventy-some species that breed there; the Silk Road in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, home to warblers, shrikes, larks, raptors, griffons, woodpeckers; New Jersey, where the World Series of Birding is held on Cape May.

It’s enough to make you want to step outside and start a life list, maybe even put a little pair of binoculars under someone’s Christmas tree.