‘You are too nerdy, Mom,’’ sighed my teenage son, when I told him that the first gift his dad ever bought me was a fine pair of binoculars. Yes, I’m a bit of a birder. Plus, in college, my husband’s work-study job was at the library, where he loved to pore over a rare copy of Audubon’s “The Birds of America,’’ with its glorious, life-size plates. In short, we are a match made in bird-nerd heaven — and those binoculars now hang by our backyard window. How handy. And how timely because the Great Backyard Bird Count is upon us.

For you 140,000 worldwide who, from Feb. 12-15, report your findings to the National Audubon Society (a mere fraction of the nation’s 46 million birders), I’ve flushed out books on the most hardcore. You want nerdy? I’ve got nerdy. Like this sentence: “I can stop through South Dakota and pick up the White-winged Junco . . . I’ll leave tonight.’’ Or this: “ ‘[H]e’s given bird names to lots of us’ . . . ‘So I’m the Brown Pelican . . . Rosie is the Western Grebe, if she isn’t the Upland Plover instead.’ ’’

These are plucked from “Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder’’ (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, first out 1997). It’s by Kenn Kaufman (nickname: Western Kingbird), who also wrote the illustrious Kaufman Field Guide series. The story pivots on 1973 when the teenage Kaufman sets out to break the record of most species seen in a year (then 626). He hitchhikes 69,000 miles, befriends plenty of other avian obsessives, and spots Chihuahuan Ravens (at a dump in Brownsville, Texas), a Buff-breasted Flycatcher (near Phoenix), and a Le Conte’s sparrow (in North Dakota).

Kaufman is a square (“hot rats’’ is his main curse word) but endearing monomaniac. My favorite manifestation of this comes when he sees a jaeger off a jetty on the Texas Gulf coast. “White flashes at the bend of the wing, dark chest band; could be either Pomarine or Parasitic. Salt stung my eyes and I lost the bird,’’ he writes. And as he peers through his telescope he tumbles right into the surf.

This is a road-trip book, and while the two men couldn’t be more different, hints of Jack Kerouac emerge. “As trivial as our listing pursuit may be, it gets us out there in the real world, paying attention, hopeful and awake,’’ he writes. Kaufman also pays homage to an earlier road-trip account, “Wild America: The Legendary Story of Two Great Naturalists on the Road’’ (Mariner, 1997, first out 1955). Those titular two are Roger Tory Peterson, the grand vizier of guidebook writers, and James Fisher, a British expert on the gull-like fulmar.

Starting in Newfoundland, they brave a 100-day, 30,000-mile circuit around coastal America, ending up at Alaska’s Pribilof Islands. They see a California condor, but no ivory-billed woodpecker, though they listen for its “nasal tooting’’ in the Louisiana swamps. Fisher rhapsodizes about typical American birds; he calls redstarts the “most beautiful warbler of the whole, beautiful American lot.’’ In the Sonoran desert, Peterson notes “the sulphur-bellied flycatchers that sang from the sycamores in excited duet like unoiled wheelbarrows.’’

Closer to home, Peterson says that Massachusetts “boasts more birdwatchers per square mile than any other state’’ and that the Concord area is “the cradle’’ of American ornithology. That story, and more, takes flight in “Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding’’ (Harcourt, 2007). Author Scott Weidensaul moves from Native Americans to Colonial Americans to sport hunting (chapter title: “Shotgun Ornithology’’) to consciousness raising, when female naturalists shame women who wear hats plumed with dead bird feathers. Cue Boston Brahmin Harriet Hemenway, who recruits Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz and Sarah Orne Jewett to her cause. Then there’s Smith College grad Florence Merriam Bailey who, in 1889, writes the first bona fide bird guide, the deliciously named “Birds Through an Opera Glass.’’

Praise be, I found one author whose diet was rich in irony. “[T]he word ‘birdwatcher’ is a synonym for ‘completely unshaggable,’ ’’ as Luke Dempsey jokes in “A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All’’ (Bloomsbury, 2008). The “three mad birders’’ are a husband and wife who can’t drive and the newly divorced Dempsey, who acts as chauffeur and compadre. The trio hit the Pacific Northwest for the murrelets, Florida for the burrowing owls, and Michigan for a rare Kirtland’s warbler!

Dempsey’s prose has real brio. Two Wilson’s warblers’ black caps are “yarmulkes,’’ for instance, while a Baltimore oriole looks like “a gaudy racing car.’’ He writes like a crankier Bill Bryson, but he’s also unabashed that birding brings “intense joy.’’ Indeed. Recently, I spied a pileated woodpecker, bashing a dead tree out our back window. It was crazy, cartoonish, big as a crow, its crest the same red as a Chicago Bulls jersey. I showed my son. Momentarily stunned, he forgot to tease me. Then he said this: “Cool.’’

Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton. She can be reached at katharine.whittemore@ comcast.net.