Quick Picks

The field guide is an indispensable tool of the birder. Birders study them, enjoy their art or photographs, and, of course, use them to identify birds. But how often do we really think about field guides and what we should expect from them? And have you ever considered the possibility that field guides may influence their users in matters other than identification? Spencer Schaffner has. In Binocular Vision, Schaffner explores the broader implications, beyond that of ID, of bird representations in field guides.

Schaffner starts with an examination of the first field guides from the late nineteenth century and contrasts their treatment of birds with modern guides. He goes on to scrutinize online and digital field guides, completing a look at the evolution of this genre from its beginnings unto today. But this book is more than a history of the field guide.

The author’s main contention is that “representations of birds and the environment in field-guide literature have much broader implications” than simply identification. Schaffner uses the term binocular vision to denote a way of “seeing and thinking about birds as detached from the physical, political, and ideological worlds that greatly affect them”. He argues that, with their focus on identification, field guides serve to foster this narrow view of nature.

I don’t agree with all of the author’s conclusions, but this book forced me to take a more critical look at field guides and what their role can and should be. And that made it very much worth reading.

Here’s the full review.

Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides
by Spencer Schaffner
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
$24.95

Disclosure: The item used to produce this review was a complementary review copy provided by the publisher.

I was first introduced to Richard Crossley’s striking photographic bird plates nearly two years ago. A post on 10,000 Birds linked to Crossley’s gallery and asked if this could become North America’s best identification guide. A year later, Princeton University Press announced that they would publish The Crossley ID Guide. The sample plates were unique and utterly amazing. I couldn’t wait to see the book for myself.

In the past month, the buildup to the book’s publication has seen more plates revealed, video interviews with the author, and a few early reviews. I was starting to wonder if it would live up to my lofty expectations. Finally, the day came when I had in my hands The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds.

After my initial look-through, I was distinctly…whelmed. I neither loved nor hated it. I still appreciated the reality birding concept that Crossley was going for, where the birds are shown as a part of a lifelike scene in their actual habitat, at various distances, and in all sorts of plumages. But maybe the novelty of the plates was starting to wear off. Some of them also looked “off” somehow, in a manner that I couldn’t quite articulate.

But as I continued through the guide, I started looking at the images more closely. I found myself trying to find all of the birds in each scene, which is not as easy as it sounds. It’s not unusual for songbird plates to have as many as 15 (or more) representatives portrayed. I also started to notice some small details, such as the House Finch that had conjunctivitis. Some images also showed behaviors that aren’t usually mentioned in field guides, much less actually illustrated, like a Rough-legged Hawk perched on a limb that looks much too small to support it, or a Blue-winged Warbler poking its head into a cluster of dead leaves.

I had to further reconsider some initial impressions when I read Crossley’s blog posts explaining some choices concerning color and sharpness in his images. To keep the plates as realistic as possible, many of them are darker and less sharp than photos we’re used to seeing in field guides. I realized that was the main source of my nebulous consternation regarding the images. Once I understood what was being attempted, it bothered me much less. However, there are some images that still seem too dark, like the Bay-breasted Warbler below. The lighting may accurately reflect the conditions in the spruce-bogs where they breed but, call me crazy, I’d like to be able to see at least one of the breeding males well.

The text, overshadowed by the images literally and figuratively, is more extensive than it appears. It covers abundance, behavior, habitat, voice, and identification. It’s very informal, and more than once certain phrases or descriptions reminded me of something Pete Dunne would write (a very big complement coming from me). Don’t skip it. The range maps are pretty standard, though unfortunately they don’t include migratory range.

I should also mention that this thing is huge. You’re not going to want to take this in the field with you. But that’s ok; everything about this book was designed to be studied at home, before you go birding.

I’ve got plenty more to say about it, including additional distinctive features and, sadly, some issues. But that’s going to have to wait for the full review. The more time I spend with The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds, the more I enjoy it and the more I learn from it. This is one book that anyone interested in North American birds needs to see.

Continue on to the full review of the Crossley guide.

This is an initial overview of the new The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America. A more detailed review is forthcoming, but I wanted to go ahead and post some thoughts before the book is widely available.

This thing is thick and hefty.

The first thing you’ll notice about this book (well, after the gorgeous bird on the cover) is the size. Not so much the trim size, which is larger than the National Geographic guide but smaller than the big Sibley and Peterson, but the thickness and heft. But 800+ pages don’t seem that bad when you realize that this guide uses over 3,400 photographs to cover 854 species.

If you do the math on the numbers above, you find that there should be an average of four photos per species. That seems about right. Most birds have a complete page devoted to them, with three to six photographs at the top, accompanied by text and range map at the bottom of the page. Some species get “only” half a page, while members of more variable groups, like hawks and gulls, usually have two pages. The layout of the guide, in which the photos are placed flush with the edges of the page, reduces white space and thus allows the pictures to be reproduced in a larger size than otherwise possible.

Most birds get an entire page all to themselves.

Though some get even more, especially the extremely variable hawks and gulls.

The text starts by focusing on the bird’s shape, and then proceeds to describe the plumages, broken down by age and gender. Notes on habitat and voice are given. Finally, it gives information on subspecies: how many subspecies are found in North America, their names, ranges, and how to differentiate them. The rather small range maps indicate the bird’s permanent, breeding, winter, and migratory ranges. They also use dotted lines to show where it rarely occurs.

Many rare and range-restricted birds are included, and get full accounts just like the more common ones.

My initial impression of the Stokes guide is very favorable. And while I think there are some improvements that could be made, this is definitely a field guide worth having. It will be impractical to use in the field due to the size and weight. But the features directly contributing to that – the number of species and generous amount of space devoted to each one – make it an ideal reference for your car or home.

Continue on to the Full Review.

North America’s most popular field guide is now available as an app on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Here is an initial review, focusing on the meat of the app – the species accounts. A full review will follow.

The majority of the screen is devoted to the art, with the text on the bottom. You can scroll up and down to see additional images, and tap to enlarge them. The text is also scrollable.

The map button replaces the bird images with a map. You cannot scroll, but can tap to zoom in slightly. Tap the button again to deselect the map and again show the bird.

Tapping the sound button brings up a list of available sounds. The selected one is automatically played.

Tapping the text makes it appear full screen, making it much easier to read.

The app is a fairly straightforward and faithful port of the Sibley print guides, both the “big” Sibley and the two regional editions. Almost all of the art is included. As best as I can tell, all of the images under each account in the book is here, but some of the sidebar/vignette images and hybrids are not. The maps are the updated ones from the regional guides. The text is mostly from the regional guides, although some additional text has been taken from the “big” Sibley where appropriate.

Overall, I am pleased to see that just about everything (including the introduction text and topography diagrams!) from the printed guides has been included in the app. However, I have found a few things that should have been included, but were not.

The app’s content, therefore, is outstanding. But some of the implementation details and features, such as the navigation, searching, and filtering capabilities, leave much to be desired. I will elaborate in the full review.

Continue to the full review of The Sibley eGuide

As mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been looking forward to finally seeing this book. So I was excited when it showed up on the doorstep yesterday. I’m planning on doing a full review eventually, but in the meantime I wanted to share some initial thoughts.

• My very first thought was amazement at how large and heavy the box from Amazon was.
• I was pleasantly surprised at the packing. I’m extremely anal about the condition of my books, and sometimes they can get dinged up in the mail. I was hoping that it would be shrink-wrapped, but the publisher did one better. Princeton is shipping these out in their own secure cardboard box, as befits a book of this quality (and price).
• This book is huge! Here are a couple of comparison shots…

And now on to the contents.

Art

Some of the sample artwork from this book had me concerned. While this monograph’s main purpose is to be a knowledge reference to this family, for many, the artwork is the main draw (pun not intended, at least until I caught it!). The art doesn’t absolutely blow me away, but I do like it. There are a few images that I don’t particularly care for, but there are also some really good ones.

Text

I haven’t had time to read much of it. And even when I do, I’m not an expert on this group of birds. But I will at least compare the family overview and species accounts with those from the Handbook of the Birds of the World.

This is a gorgeous, well-produced book. The only thing even slightly unattractive about it is the copious amount of white space. I know it’s not a simple either/or, but I would rather this large book with large art and a lot of white space than a smaller book with smaller art and less space.

At over $100, I can’t say that this book, no matter how nice, would be worth it for everyone. But I can say that it was for me.

As you can see, the new Peterson guide (in the middle) is significantly larger than the last edition of the eastern regional guide. It even approaches the “large Sibley” in size. Naturally, since this new book covers all the species in North America, you would expect it to be thicker. But the trim size has also been increased. Thankfully, for the most part the publisher has used this extra room to reproduce the art in a larger size and expand the text accounts instead of cramming in more species on each plate.

Most of Peterson’s paintings have been ported over with no changes. However, some digital enhancements have been done to many of the illustrations. If you click on this comparison picture of the flycatcher plates you should be able to see some subtle differences (the new book is on bottom). Each of these empids have been modified at least slightly, although my photography probably won’t allow you to see some of it. But you can easily see, for example, that the Yellow-bellied is now more greenish above and the primary projection of the Least is shorter.

These changes have been used to add or modify field marks, change the shape, or make other subtle modifications according to the current knowledge of identification. All of the ones that I noticed on species that I’m familiar with have improved the image.

However, there are some more extensive changes as well, as evidenced by this plate of spotted thrushes. If you look closely at the thrushes shown on both plates – Veery, Gray-cheeked, Swainson’s, and Hermit – you will see that they have not only been modified, they are completely new paintings Update: actually, it is not new. See below…. In this case there are some differences, such as the amount and darkness of the breast spots, that could have been accomplished with enhancements instead of a completely new image. Thus, presumably there was another reason for the replacement. For this plate, I think it was the addition of the new bird, Bicknell’s Thrush, and the inclusion of the western forms of Swainson’s and Hermit. I am assuming that in order to include these new images it necessitated a compete redo.

There are a few cases of replacement where the reasoning is not evident to me. But most appear to be a case of plate layout, as with these thrushes, or where the changes needed were so extensive that it made more sense to start from scratch. However, it is obvious that great care has been taken to make sure that these changes and replacements do not stand out. Where possible, the birds in the new paintings have been placed in the exact same pose as in Peterson’s original. Many times I had to carefully examine the images to tell whether they had been enhanced or completely replaced. Unless you are extremely familiar with Peterson’s work, or compare the plates side-by-side, you will probably not notice the changes.

There are also some changes on the facing pages, such as the increased size for the map thumbnails. As in the previous regional guides, there is a section in the back that gathers together all of the maps in a much larger format, with annotations.

Update: I finally got a chance to do some comparisons with the Western guide. It turns out that many of the paintings I thought had been redone were actually taken from the Western edition instead of the more recent Eastern. That includes these thrushes (except the Bicknell’s is still new). I had figured that the plates in the Eastern, being worked on much more recently, were more up-to-date. But there are probably more considerations that I’m not aware of.
No wonder all of those “new” paintings fit in so well! 🙂

For more information on this guide, see its featured page – The New Peterson Guide.

This afternoon I found the new Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America waiting for me on the porch. I haven’t had time to go through it extensively, much less write a review, but I thought some of you may appreciate a quick look at it.

Here are some looks at the guide. I apologize for the quality of the pictures. They are aweful. No, they are worse than aweful. But regardless, they will give you an idea of the layout.

A unique feature of this guide is that it includes a DVD with “587 downloadable bird songs” (but only 138 species, total). It also comes with a nice booklet listing all the tracks. Here are all the species included. Again, I apologize for the format, but it was the best I could do on short notice. I’ll try to work up something better for the full review.

I haven’t had long enough with it to feel comfortable making a recommendation. That will have to wait for my full review. As a comparison, it seems most similar to the recent National Wildlife Federation guide. But in the meantime, if you normally buy every field guide that comes out (I can’t be the only one!), I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t add this one to your library as well.

A full review of the Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America is now available.

If Pete Dunne wrote a restaurant menu, I would read it word for word. He is easily my favorite birding author. Here is a list of all the books that he has written, along with magazines that for which he is a regular contributor.

I have read most of these books, and they are without exception highly recommended. For birders, the most important is arguably the Field Guide Companion. It is so helpful with identification that every North American birder should have a copy. I would say that Pete Dunne on Bird Watching is next on the must-read list, as it is probably the best introduction to birding that I have seen. And if you just want to sit back and enjoy a great read? You can’t go wrong with The Feather Quest, which is one of the best birding travel books. Honestly, you can’t go wrong with any of them!

Birding/Identification

• Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion: A Comprehensive Resource for Identifying North American Birds (Review)
• Pete Dunne on Bird Watching (Review)
• The Art of Bird Identification: A Straightforward Approach to Putting a Name to the Bird (Review)
• The Art of Pishing: How to Attract Birds by Mimicking Their Calls (Book & Audio CD)
• The Art of Bird Finding: Before You ID Them, You Have to See Them (Review)
• Hawks in Flight (Review)

Other

• The Feather Quest: A North American Birder’s Year
• The Wind Masters: The Lives of North American Birds of Prey (Review)
• Prairie Spring: A Journey Into the Heart of a Season (Review)
• Bayshore Summer: Finding Eden in a Most Unlikely Place (Review)
• Arctic Autumn: A Journey to Season’s Edge (Review)

Essays

• Tales of a Low-Rent Birder
• More Tales of a Low-Rent Birder (Review)
• Golden Wings, and Other Stories About Birders and Birding
• Small-headed Flycatcher. Seen Yesterday. He Didn’t Leave His Name.: and other stories
• Before the Echo: Essays on Nature (Corrie Herring Hooks Series)

Other books Dunne has contributed to

• New Jersey: The Natural State – wrote the forward
• Good Birders Don’t Wear White: 50 Tips From North America’s Top Birders (Review) – wrote the forward (complete text), and contributed one of the tips
• Hawks at a Distance: Identification of Migrant Raptors (Review) – wrote the forward
• Birds of Cape May (Review) – wrote the forward

Magazines

• Living Bird (Review) – Dunne writes a one-page column, “The Catbird Seat”, for every other issue (published quarterly)
• BirdWatching – Dunne contributes a column for every issue, usually focused on his travels (published bi-monthly)
• News from the Cape – this online magazine from the Cape May Bird Observatory has a regular column by Dunne. Be sure to check out the archives for more Dunne goodness (and after that all the other features on identification, book reviews, etc)

In addition to these, Dunne has been published in probably every birding magazine known to man (well, at least in the US).

There has to be more that I’m either forgetting or don’t know about. If anyone is aware of more, especially anything that can be accessed online, I’d love to hear about it!