Fieldcraft: How to choose the birding field guide that is best for you

Short-billed Dowitchers starting molt into breeding plumage. San Diego, California. April 2, 2017.

Do you want your field guide detailed enough to identify these birds transitioning into breeding plumage?

Or, is, "some kind of dowitcher" good enough for you?

First of all, there is no "best" bird field guide. There are many excellent field guides available on the market. One of these just might be the best field guide for you.

You have four decisions to make first, however, regarding how you will use your guide and what you want it to show. Consider these four decisions carefully.

First, is usage. How will you use this guide? Is this an identification guide that sits at home or in the car for reference, or is it a field guide that you will carry with you to put a name on the bird before you? A true field guide is compact enough to carry easily. To be compact means that it will be brief compared to some identification guides. Thus, to be useful, it must be very well-organized to actually find the bird quickly.

Second, how detailed must it be? Or, rather, how much detail do you want left out? Do you want it to show only breeding males? Females if different? Non-breeding plumage if different? Juvenile and immature plumage if held for the fall and winter? Subspecies variation where field-identifiable? How much information do you want about habitat? Songs? Behavior? Nesting? Similar species? Range in text or maps?

Third, how inclusive must it be? Must it show every species ever seen in your region or just the most likely? Or even fewer--just the most common and obvious? And what is your region? A state? A geographic province? A continent?

Fourth, is the visual medium. Do you want photos or artistic illustration? A photograph is one individual on one day of it's life, in the light conditions of the day, time, and location, with the camera settings of the photographer (and the computer post-processing), doing whatever the bird was doing at the time of the photograph (probably being slightly alarmed by being stalked by this human with this giant glass eyeball staring at it!). No two birds are exactly alike. In fact, with continuous molt, wear, and body fat changes, that one bird will never again look exactly the way it does today. Some drawings are very lifelike, others are more patternistic so you don't get lost in feather details that don't help with the identification. Most drawings are an "average," and can show a typical posture and habitat or, alternatively, might show all birds in identical posture with no shadows in order to emphasize only the pattern differences.

If you can provide definite answers to as many of these field guide "trade-offs" ("style choices"?) as possible, you will be able to pick out your own best field guide, now and in the future. The answers to the level of detail needed and how inclusive it must be are very important. Are you okay letting some female or immature birds go unidentified? Do you care about the identification of very rare look-a-likes that are possible but not likely? Do you only care about a very small region or will you be birding more widely?

At first, every bird will be new and unfamiliar to you. So you may want to start with a simple guide. After a couple of months you will learn the common birds in your area. If you reach this point and have too "simple" of a field guide, you will quickly note many birds that aren't depicted. Fortunately, field guides are inexpensive and you can "move up" to a more comprehensive guide.

Starting with a "simpler" guide might be preferable, though, to being overwhelmed by the more detailed and inclusive guides. A field guide should encourage identification. If it's too complicated it will discourage.

On the other hand, if you've been bitten by the "birding bug," you will quickly out-grow a simpler guide and would gladly take on the challenge of the more detailed guides, so that as few birds as possible get away unidentified.

Here are a few popular books in North America and others on my bookshelf and how I rate them using the 4 criteria above.

Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Seventh Edition). Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer. 2017. National Geographic Society, Washington DC.
Buy it at Amazon.com.

Slightly larger and heavier than the standard field guide; may fit in a coat pocket. Very detailed; numerous illustrations of over 1000 species. Textual descriptions of plumage, voice, habitat, range, some behavioral notes. North America, excluding Mexico, but including Greenland. Painted by different artists but most are highly detailed, feather-sharp, with plumage annotations, and some habitat illustrated.

The Sibley Guide to Birds (Second Edition). David Allen Sibley. 2014. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

The "Big Sibley" (there are several smaller regional guides). Larger and heavier, won't fit in most pockets. Very detailed; numerous illustrations of each species; maps; textual descriptions of identification marks, habitat, behavior, and voice. All species also shown in flight. North America, excluding Mexico and Greenland. All paintings by the author, with excellent posture and proportions, many in life-like poses with annotations and a very few habitat hints. [Get the 2nd printing of July 2014 that fixes color and text contrast issues.]

A Field Guide to Western Birds (Third Edition). Roger Tory Peterson. 1990. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.

I know there are more recent editions (Fourth Edition to all of North America, exclusive of Mexico), but this may be the last in the 5x7.5 inch traditional Peterson pocket-sized field guide. It is less detailed than the guides above, with fewer illustrations per species, so less overwhelming for beginners. Text describes identification, voice, habitat, and, helpfully,  similar species. Maps are all together in the back. This includes half a continent--the Western US and Canada (not Hawaii as earlier editions), so perhaps 100 fewer species than the entire continent. It uses Peterson's more patternistic art style and stiff right-facing poses with arrows pointing to the field marks. This simplifies the identification process for beginners.

The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America. Donald and Lillian Stokes. 2010. Little, Brown and Company, New York.
Buy it at Amazon.com

Larger and fat. Very heavy with 790 pages and a CD of bird songs that I have never used. Very detailed desk reference; this book may average 5 illustrations per species. Much text. Rather than Peterson's "field marks" approach, this guide teaches identification first with shape, a very effective way to quickly narrow down your identification to the correct family of birds. All major plumages are described in the text, along with habitat and voice. Maps are very accurate. Subspecies are described. 850 species in North America, excluding Mexico and Greenland. This guide uses 1/6th to 1/8th page size photographs with no annotations--read the text. For more advanced birders.

Birds of Oregon. Roger Burrows and Jeff Gilligan. 2003. Lone Pine Publishing, Auburn, Washington.

At 5.5x8.5 it might fit in a pocket. It skips detailed illustrations and averages about 1-1/2 illustrations per species. So this makes it more of a car reference for beginners who want to find and identify the common birds. However, it is fairly detailed in the text, beginning with a full paragraph life-history overview of each species. ID text telegraphs main plumage marks, size, status, habitat, nesting, feeding, voice, similar species, best sites, and summer/winter maps. It includes only the most frequent 75% (328 species) of Oregon's birds, forgoing those that have less than maybe 5 records per year. It is illustrated with fairly large paintings.

These example field guides should give you an example of how to analyze field guides and help you choose the birding field guide that is best for you.

Essay: 50 Years of Field Guide Changes--a personal perspective

I haven't quite yet been birding 50 years. But my first field guide, the one I bought in 1973, was Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds, published in 1969 [a version of the 2nd edition of 1961]. Now that the calendar has reached 2019 I wanted to look back at some of the history. I don't want to review the field guides individually, so much as get a feel for the kinds of changes that have happened over the past 50 years. I want to review how birders responded as newer guides arrived. Or, at least, how I remember it.

First, let me describe my 1969 version of Peterson's work. It is sitting there on my shelf. I've thinned and weeded my bookshelf over the years. I now own far fewer bird books than I have in the past. So the fact it still remains says how much it is revered. The hard-cover is held on with various layers of duct tape, packing tape, and masking tape. Several pages in the introduction are loose. I had underlined field marks and voice for nearly each species. I added notations that were liberally crammed in the narrow margins. Name changes I dutifully updated through the 1980s. There may even be a spotted owl feather as a bookmark. The main point is this. This book was studied. This book was loved. It is the most prized book on my shelf. Why? It was my first.

One of these books is not like the others.

The layout of that guide was this: 60 plates and 24 pages of line illustrations, scattered throughout the 366 pages. All the finches, sparrows, buntings, and grosbeaks took only 4 plates. All the herons, ibises, storks, and cranes were on a single plate. Oh, and it was black-and-white (well, really, gray-scale), as were about half the plates. Illustrations were schematic, patternistic rather than showing feather details that mark the style of today's bird books. There were no maps; the ranges were written out. Each account listed similar species, nests, and eggs--in a nod to a form of the hobby no longer deemed appropriate. The voice descriptions used English sound-alike words. That's still how I hear birds today--with Peterson's descriptions. 687 species were covered for this western version, plus 60 species in Hawaii.

How far have we come? There were only two Empidonax illustrations. One illustration showed a "Western Flycatcher." Another was for all the rest, labeled "Trail's Flycatcher," that supposedly illustrated the field marks of Willow, Dusky, Hammond's, and Gray Flycatchers. The text for Hammond's Flycatcher says, "It is a standing joke among western ornithologists that no one seems to have an infallible way of telling Hammond's and Dusky Flycatchers apart in the field (italics in original)."

There was one illustration for "Dowitcher." No illustrations for breeding, non-breeding, and juvenile. No illustrations for Long-billed versus Short-billed, or the several distinctive subspecies of the latter.

No wonder so many birds went by unidentified, or worse: misidentified. But this allowed me to do my own observations and research and put those field marks in the margins.

Actually, there was another field guide. It was first published in 1966: Birds of North America, the so called, "Golden Guide," after the publisher, Golden Press. Looking at the book now, it seems this work by Robbins, Brunn, Zim, and Singer, was really a landmark. It had color illustrations of every species in lifelike poses, male and female where they differed, summer and winter, and immatures. The illustrations also included just a hint of habitat. It had maps and text on the left hand page; on the right hand page were the bird illustrations--all together. And it showed all North American birds (north of Mexico), 700 species with more than 5 records since 1900. Oh, and sonograms, as well as word descriptions of the voice!

You would think, then, that birders of the time would have jumped at this new and more complete guide. And maybe they did. For some reason, though, the young birders of the 1970s that I knew disdained the Golden Guide in favor of the tradition of Peterson. At least, that's the way I remember it.

The Third Edition (1990) of Peterson's Western field guide had text and facing plates. Many of the illustrations were still from the 1961 edition, but at least they were shown larger. Maps were still at the end of the book. But it didn't matter. A new field guide had claimed the first spot in popularity. The Peterson field guides, once the bird field guide, became an also-ran.

The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America arrived in 1983. It updated regularly as names and checklist order changed and new species were added. This book always kept up with any new North American records, thus always had more species than any other. I've bought a new edition about every other printed edition to the now 7th Edition (2017) . The illustrations were especially uneven at first, the result of many different artists and styles. Later editions (starting with the 5th) benefited from the "feather detail" artistry and editing of Jonathan Alderfer (see American Woodcock illustration and compare with Sibley's). Paul Lehman's work on the maps in this guide have always been top-notch.

Bird field guides proliferated in the 1980s, continuing to today. But none could touch the "NatGeo" guide. That is, until the year 2000 when the Sibley Guide to Birds was published.

Sibley's illustrations, all done by him in the same style, are unifying. Even Peterson's artwork seems uneven by comparison. Sibley is excellent at getting the posture and the proportions correct. The Second Edition (2014) provides much more textual ID than the first. It's maps now match the quality, accuracy, and information content of those in the National Geographic guide. Sibley's Introduction is superior.

From the year 2000 until today, the "best" field guide is whichever of the National Geographic or Sibley guides is the most recent edition. What active birder wouldn't own them both?

But you know what? My Second Edition Sibley and my Seventh Edition National Geographic guides are pristine. Unmarked. They never leave my library--they come off the shelf to check a detail, then go right back. They are excellent field guides, far superior to my worn out, black-and-white, 1969 Peterson guide. They are my go-to references whenever I have an identification question. But unlike my Peterson's guide,... they are unloved.

Field Guides: What is a "field-friendly" bird sequence?

The American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) Checklist Committee is the official body from which the North American bird checklist is derived. This checklist is the basis for both the names of birds and the order they occur in your field guide, wildlife refuge bird lists, and your eBird checklist. It is the basis for the checklist you may use in the annual Great Backyard Bird Count and Christmas Bird Counts. It is updated annually, usually July.

The annual checklist supplement reports the official "splits" and "lumps," deciding (based on published scientific literature) what species exist and what do not. It is the official name-maker/arbiter for both the common and scientific names of birds. It also adds any well-documented first records for North and Middle America. Many birders are excited to find out what "new" birds they may be able to count on their lists each year. This past year Western Scrub-Jay was split into two species: California Scrub-Jay and Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay, along with many other changes.

Proposals under consideration for 2017 include splitting Willet, Nashville Warbler, Northern Harrier, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Brown Creeper, Northern Shrike, Red Crossbill, Bell's Vireo. Proposals have also been put forth to lump Common and Hoary Redpoll, to lump Thayer's and Iceland Gull, and to lump Dark-eyed and Yellow-eyed Junco. And, yes, major changes are proposed to the sequence of families of songbirds.

In the recent past, many field guide publishers were usually in a rush to be the first to print revisions using the new names and added species. When the sequence changes however, field guide authors and publishers are a bit more hesitant.

My Sibley guide from 2000 has the loons and grebes first, followed by petrels and pelicans, as does my 1969 Peterson field guide, and so does my 1940 Birds of Oregon by Gabrielson and Jewett. That time-honored sequence was shaken up due to DNA work in recent years.

Thus, my 2014 Sibley has ducks and chickens first, then loons, grebes, petrels, and pelicans. There were some other changes as well, like falcons and parrots following the woodpeckers.

Last summer (2016) the AOU Checklist Committee again approved radically changing the sequence of birds in its official checklist. Now the order is: ducks, chickens, grebes, pigeons, cuckoos, nightjars, swifts, hummingbirds, rails. And the loons, petrels, pelicans, herons are moved after gulls. Hawks are back with owls just before woodpeckers. House Sparrow is again moved back after Starling, but finches follow that just before the warblers, and blackbirds are last. The final bird in the current North American checklist is Scott's Oriole! More changes are in store. And yet, where are the new field guides in that sequence?

Surprisingly, eBird, the tremendously popular worldwide real-time birding checklist program by Cornell University, delayed making these sequence changes to their online lists last year. They didn't say why, only that they'd make changes in 2017 (I assume August, after the next AOU list update)--perhaps they simply needed more time for programming to make the changes, or they anticipated major 2017 changes.

With so many disruptive changes to the checklist order we've been hearing more and more rumblings of field guides ordered in a "field-friendly" bird sequence, not strictly dependent upon the order in the checklist.

Sample of how birds might be arranged in a "field-friendly" approach.

What is a field-friendly bird sequence? I discussed this several years ago on another blog (here and here).

The AOU checklist is not field-friendly. It's not supposed to be. It represents supposed relationships, subject to constant re-analysis and interpretation. As an example, in the blog posts above I used the fact that Great Blue Herons and Sandhill Cranes--while visibly similar, and often confused by beginners--are not closely related, and are found far apart in the field guides. The same goes for Pied-billed Grebes and American Coots--birds that appear superficially similar but are found far apart in the checklist. In fact the Coot and the Crane are closely related and found near each other in the field guide, even though they look nothing alike. Having field guides strictly follow the checklist makes it very difficult and confusing for beginning bird watchers.

A field-friendly sequence would put the long-legged and long-necked herons and cranes near each other and near sandpipers and ibis. It would put the swimming coots and grebes near the ducks and loons and alcids. The first grouping might be called "Wading Waterbirds" (not totally correct for every species, but close enough to get the idea). The second group could be called "Swimming Waterbirds." A third group could be called "Flying Waterbirds" and include gulls, petrels, boobies, and skuas. Get the idea? Those three "Waterbird" groupings include almost a third of the birds in the world. "Raptors" would include hawks, eagles, owls, and falcons.

Even the songbirds could be divided up into only a half-dozen major groupings. Altogether, all species in North America could be placed simply and logically into one of only 13 groups--easy enough for beginners and accurate enough for advanced students! This certainly has been discussed before (see this article in Birding magazine by Howell, et al. in 2009). A couple of bird field guides have even attempted it, successfully or not (1997 All the Birds of North America by Griggs, 2000 Birds of North America by Kaufman, 2011 The Crossley ID Guide).

Field guides using the field-friendly sequence would not be re-ordered every time there was a change to the sequence in the checklist. Names could be updated, and a new species inserted, but a book wouldn't have to be re-ordered and laid out from scratch (not that books are long for this world). But however we may view future birding field guides, checklist order is not birder friendly.

Back in 2012 I proposed a field-friendly sequence as thus:
Swimming Waterbirds
Flying Waterbirds
Wading Waterbirds
Chicken-like Birds
Raptors
Miscellaneous Landbirds
Aerial Landbirds
Flycatcher-like Birds
Thrush-like Songbirds
Chickadee and Wren-like Songbirds
Warbler-like Songbirds
Sparrow and Finch-like Songbirds
Blackbird-like Songbirds

How does it work in practice? Try it for yourself. I combined about 1500 of my pBase bird photos with my annotated checklist to create a Field-Friendly Guide to San Diego Birds. Let me know what you think.

An Annotated Bird Checklist to San Diego County

I have created a stand-alone page for an Annotated Checklist to the Birds of San Diego County.

The main purpose of this checklist is to answer the question:
"When and where is the best place to find each bird species within San Diego County?"

Use the comments section of this post to offer corrections or additions to the checklist. I will use your comments to keep the checklist up-to-date and as accurate as I can.

What, exactly, is an annotated checklist? Well, a simple checklist is a list of birds that have been found in the county. Most checklists also provide seasonal abundance. An annotated checklist provides additional information in the form of textual annotations.

Why is an annotated checklist needed?

518 species of birds have been found in San Diego County (counting the newly split Townsend's Storm-Petrel in July 2016). Only five states have recorded more birds: Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas. Of course, being far to the south and west, San Diego has recorded many birds that aren't expected very often. Of those 500+ species, how many can you be likely to see in a single year?

The authority on the birds of the county is the 600+ page book "San Diego County Bird Atlas" by Philip Unitt, published in 2004. This volume maps and discusses birds during a 5-year county-wide survey by hundreds of volunteer birders from March 1997 to February 2002. Like me, you can buy this book for $50 on Amazon.com (but only 6 left).

The San Diego Field Ornithologists provide a County Checklist. It lists every species of bird ever found in the county along with a rarity status code.

These two references suffer from opposite problems as far as birders seeking information on bird-finding. The checklist is too brief and the book too in-depth for quickly finding information.

The book is also starting to suffer from obsolescence due to two things: 1) Bird populations are constantly changing and the book is now a dozen years old. 2) 20% of the county has burned since publication, including 98% of the mountain conifer forest in the huge Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.

A new source of bird distribution information started in 2002: eBird. This citizen science web-based bird reporting database system really took off in 2010, growing since then at a rate of 20-30% per year. In May 2016 a record 11.8 million bird records from around the world were added to the database during just that one month! California has always been at the forefront of eBird, and San Diego bird records are well-represented.

How this annotated checklist came about

As I approach 3 years living and birding in San Diego County I have now seen most of the expected annual species. But there are still several species I haven't found. And I have yet to find over 300 species in any single year. So, rather than rely on chance and my own exploration, I researched both the Atlas and eBird to try to figure out when and where each species is most likely to be found.

Knowing that others would benefit from my research, I organized and preserved my findings on the page in this link: http://sandiegogreg.blogspot.com/p/annotated-checklist-of-birds-of-san.html

I hope you find it useful.

Book Review: Birding by Impression

Birding by Impression: A different approach to knowing and identifying birds. Kevin T. Karlson and Dale Rosselet. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Boston/New York. 2015. Hardcover. 286 pages.

There are many field usable clues to a bird's identity other than the patternistic "field marks" put forward by Roger Tory Peterson in 1934. Thus, this new entry in the Peterson Field Guide series, Birding by Impression tackles bird identification using size, shape, behavior, and then adding plumage patterns and general colors, as well has habitat and finally vocalizations.

Rather than covering all North American species, this book covers groups of bird orders, up to perching birds, then covers the various family groups in the passerine order. In each of these chapters some specific identification problem is solved using Birding by Impression (BBI).

One fun learning tool is the inclusion of 219 photo quizzes. Wonderful!

Having trouble separating juvenile Black-bellied Plover, American Golden-Plover and Pacific Golden-Plover? It's there on page 96-98, following the general Plovers information. Do you understand the concept? Turn to the appendix for the photo quiz answer to Figure 89.

This is an informative book. And if one really puts in the study, there is much to be learned here. For instance, I learned that the crown of Rusty Blackbird is more rounded than Brewer's Blackbird.

Vocalizations are first on my list of how I both notice and then identify birds. However, it is included last in this book. The statement that "duck vocalizations rarely play a role in the ID process" is simply not true for puddle ducks. Mallard, gadwall, pintail, wigeon, shoveler, Green-winged Teal, Wood Duck all have unique calls that give them away as they fly overhead in the morning fog or sound off from their concealment in the marsh. Visit any hunting store and find duck calls for each of these.

Flying is the defining means of locomotion for most birds. We see more birds in flight than sitting still. Yet many birders have not been taught to identify birds in flight. So the nearly complete lack of flight style information (except for storm-petrels) was just sad. The description of the difference between crows and ravens in flight was right on. But there was really nothing on the differences between swallows in flight that help make their high-in-the-sky animated silhouettes instantly recognizable to species. And nothing on the distinctive flight styles of the different sparrows as they flush away from you off the road edge. Not only were descriptions of flight style lacking, but there were no instructions or terminology. It's as if the authors think that birds cannot be identified in flight.

In many ways, this book is preceded by the works of Kaufman's Field Guide to Advanced Birding (2011) (size and shape, habitat, behavior), Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion (2006) (habitat, behavior, flight, vocalizations), and Alderfer and Dunn's Birding Essentials (2007) (size, structure, shape, plumage pattern and color, behavior, flight, typical movements, feeding behavior, voice).

The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America (2010) uses to good effect shape perched and shape in flight, as well as plumage, habitat, and voice. This under-appreciated work gives one a good idea of what is possible in a field guide that uses Birding by Impression in combination with traditional plumage descriptions.

---

I have thought quite a bit about the technique or methodology that I personally use to identify birds. First and foremost I locate and identify more than half the birds I encounter by voice (exceptions being seabirds, gulls, diving ducks, and distant shorebirds and raptors) Then I observe shape. Thirdly, I use flight style to identify flying birds before using any plumage characters. I guess its time to organize all my notes and finally create that "how to" manual for identifying birds in flight.

	Birding by Impression	Greg's methodology
1	Size	Vocalizations and other sounds
2	Shape	Shape
3	Behavior	Flight style
4	Plumage patterns and colors	Size
5	Habitat	Behavior
6	Vocalizations	Habitat
7		Plumage patterns and colors
8		Status and distribution

Rare Birds of California now online!

Saw this on the May 2014 Birding Community E-Bulletin monthly newsletter.

The 2007 book Rare Birds of California, though now out of print, is reproduced in full online here.

Bookmark it and explore!