ALBANY — Whether you’re looking to add a spruce grouse to your life list or commune with loons on a moonlit lake, a new guide to birding in the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park can show you the way.

Written by John Peterson and Gary Lee, Adirondack residents with decades of field experience, “Adirondack Birding” highlights 60 prime spots with a diversity of habitats and bird life, from marshy bogs to wind-swept crags.

The authors say the Adirondack region, with more than 300 avian species documented, hosts a variety of birds rivaling that found anywhere in the Northeast.

The guide breaks the Adirondacks into five regions and describes prime birding spots within each, with precise travel directions, descriptive accounts of the landscape, and information on the birds likely to be encountered.

Among the sites in the eastern region is “The Magic Triangle,” an area of swampland and farm fields near Lake Champlain named for “the almost supernatural variety of birds found there.” The authors say more than 100 species nest in the area and many more migrants stop by. Winter fields are often visited by snow buntings, horned larks and Bohemian waxwings.

The Lake Champlain Valley serves as a busy north-south highway for migrants between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains of Vermont. It’s a region rich in rarities including black scoter, black-headed gull, black tern, black guillemot, Wilson’s phalarope and Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow.

In the High Peaks region near Lake Placid, an iconic view of craggy Adirondack mountains provides the backdrop to fields where grassland species such as vesper and Savannah sparrows, various warblers and flycatchers, and occasional rarities such as the northern hawk owl can be found.

The Whitney Wilderness in the central Adirondacks is a great place to canoe and kayak on remote lakes and look for loons, gray jays, boreal chickadees, black-backed woodpeckers and wood warblers.

If you want to spy the rare spruce grouse, the authors recommend a visit to Spring Pond Bog near Tupper Lake in the northern Adirondacks. Permission from the Nature Conservancy is needed to visit the preserve, where more than 130 species of birds have been documented. A boardwalk takes you out over the peat bog mat.

In the west-central region, the Moose River Recreation Area has 28 miles of dirt roads through a range of habitats including bogs, boreal forest, upland hardwoods, lakes, and spruce-covered mountaintops. Lee served as the state forest ranger in the Moose River Plains for 33 years.

Lee writes that he has seen more than 150 species of birds breeding in the region, which he describes as a “birder’s paradise.” Besides species such as the indigo bunting, least flycatcher and American woodcock, you might see a moose — or at least the tracks of one.

The authors include a section on where to find boreal, or northern, species, which are of special interest to many birders. For instance, the American three-toed woodpecker is found in spruce bogs with standing dead trees, and Bicknell’s thrush is found in the scrub spruce and balsam forest just below the summit of Whiteface Mountain.

The book has numerous maps and scenic photographs and includes 46 stunning color photos of Adirondack birds by freelance nature photographer Jeff Nadler.

The authors ask readers to respect the sites described in the book, lest they become degraded through overuse, and encourage readers to use it as a starting point to discover their own favorite birding spots in the Adirondacks.

The book, published by Lost Pond Press, is distributed by the Adirondack Mountain Club and is available in bookstores and online.

On the Web

Adirondack Mountain Club: www.adk.org