This book joins an expanding shelf of breeding bird atlases published since. It follows the geographic format of focusing on a single county established with the publication of the standard-setting Marin County Breeding Bird Atlas (W. D. Shuford, 1993, Bushtit Books, Bolinas, CA). Although the Santa Clara book was published in 2007, it is based on field work from 1987 to 1993, although it is updated with information on additional species breeding from 1994 to 2006. What I first noticed about this book was its size—a whopping 547 pages—which at least partly explains why the book took so long to get completed after the field work was finished. So when I read the first line of the introduction stating that the purpose of the book was to “to determine the birds that breed within a geographic area,” I was surprised. It greatly surpasses this simple stated purpose and provides a rich understanding of the breeding avifauna (and more) of Santa Clara County.