A beginner's guide to field guides

A beginning birder recently asked my advice on which field guide to invest in.  Here is a list of the more popular choices, in terms of what you see in bookstores, together with my ten-cent reviews.

1.  The Audubon guides.  You'd think that the National Audubon Society would put out the definitive field guide, but alas that is not the case.  The fatal flaw is the use of photographs instead of paintings.  The result is you get one view of one bird at one stage of its life.  Furthermore, in order to get photos, it is often necessary to shoot the birds in positions and postures where they are not usually found in the field.  For instance, the swallow pictures are all taken at the nest or perched on a wire, whereas in the field they are far more often encountered on the wing, where the identification problems are entirely different.  A clever artist can convey a great deal more information by synthesizing impressions from manyexperiences.  Also, the text in the NAS guides is much too skimpy to be useful in any but the most obvious identifications. In short, this is my least favorite guide.

2.  The Stokes guides.  Very popular and written for popular tastes, but not authoritative in any way.  Illustrations leave a lot to be desired and the text is way too simplistic.

3.  The Golden Guide (I think it is called something else now).  It was very innovative 40 years ago.  It was the first guide to put the illustrations and the text on facing pages, and Arthur Singer's illustrations were very fresh.  Sadly, it has not kept pace and is rarely used by serious birders today.

4.  The Peterson guides.  Written by the dean of American bird-watching, the guy that invented the field guide in 1936.  In his later years, however, Peterson fell behind the tremendous advances in the state of the art advances that he had put in motion to begin with.  Peterson died in 1996.  A new edition of Peterson's eastern guide was published in 2002, but in my view, the revisions were not sufficient to restore the authority of the earlier editions.  Nevertheless, I think they are still worth a mention for two reasons.  First, the illustrations are superb.  In just about every instance, they capture the essence of the living bird like no others. Second, Peterson's guides come in two flavors, east and west.  By starting with just the Eastern birds, you will spend a lot less time barking up wrong trees.  Moreover, Peterson's guides are still small enough to carry in a back pocket, and that is not a trivial advantage.

5.  The Kaufman guide.  The Kaufman guide is focused on the beginning birder.  It is written by a birder of unrivalled credentials.  The text is very good, maybe the best of the lot.  However, the illustrations are basically photos that have been heavily processed in Photoshop.  It is an interesting idea, but in  my view not very successful.  It does not seem to have caught on among serious birders, but it is certainly worth a critical look.  It may have charms for the beginning birder that are not apparent to those of us brought up on other books.

6.  The National Geographic guide.  Until recently, the Nat Geo guide was the US standard.  It is still an excellent choice for birders of all levels.  It illustrates every species that regularly occurs north of the Mexican border and almost all the well-differentiated subspecies, as well as juvenile and intermediate plumages, color morphs, etc.  However, for the beginning birder such profusion often results in sensory overload.  I can't tell you the number of beginning birders who have decided that a strange bird in their backyard was a Pyrrhuloxia when it was a female Cardinal all along.  If you haven't got the picture of the Pyrrhuloxia, a bird of the southwestern deserts, in your book, you are not likely to bite on it.

The other reservation about the Nat Geo guide is that it is written and illustrated by committees.  The contributors are generally well-qualified, but it does lead to a certain unevenness from one section to another.  This is particularly true of the illustrations. 

7.  The Sibley guides.  David Sibley is a terrific artist and this is thus largely a visual guide.  It is chock full of illustrations of birds perched, flying, feeding, doing just about everything birds do. The text is somewhat skimpy, though accurate.  The main deficiencies of the text is that there is little habitat information and the vocalizations are rendered poorly.  Furthermore, one must realize that Sibley's illustration technique is highly stylized, particularly the colors.  He is obviously going for a schematic effect; he wants to conjure up the impression of the bird, rather than rendering a feather-by-feather portrait.

It is interesting to me that in Peterson's first couple of editions, he did something similar.  For instance, he did all the ducks in blocks of black and white on the theory that when one sees ducks at a distance in the winter, the light is not usually very good and that washes out the color.  His aim was verisimilitude in the experience, rather than in the bird.  As time went on, these illustrations were replaced by full color depictions of the ducks at close range in good light.  I suspect that Peterson just could not resist the clamor of his public for more of his superb art.  The same fate may eventually overtake Sibley.

The standard Sibley guide contains all the birds that the Nat Geo guide does and is so large that it is hard to use in the field.  Some say that this is a good thing because it teaches the student to make careful observations and THEN consult the field guide.  I tend to agree with this, but few have the patience to do it.  A middle way, perhaps, is afforded by the fact the Sibley's also comes in an eastern and a western edition.  These are much easier to carry, certainly no more difficult than the Nat Geo guide.

Sibley also has out a beginner's guide to birding.  This is not a field guide, but a collection of field birding lore, something the beginning birder will probably be interested in.  He has also published a much bigger book on bird life and behavior, a sort of guide to ornithology for birdwatchers.  I think sooner or later, you will want that book or something like it in your library.

State field guides are becoming increasingly available and these can be a real boon for the beginning birder.  Jim McCormick's book on the birds of Ohio is a good example.  The illustrations are nice, but are not so plentiful as to allow one to dispense with a field guide.  The text is very good and is pointedly specialized to Ohio.  There is also an excellent map for each species and a bar chart time line that makes it clear where and when the bird is to be expected in Ohio and in what relative numbers.  This is a tremendous help to those with little experience in the state and to beginners, as well.

So, what is my answer to your question?  Hard to say, because at some point it becomes a matter of taste.  You may even come around to the approach I (and many others, I suspect) have taken:  buy 'em all. Sooner or later, you will come across a problem that one of them treats better than the others.