Field Guides
National Geographic Field Guide to the
Birds of North America
First published in 1983, the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America represented a major departure from Roger Tory Peterson’s eastern and western guides, which dominated the marketplace. Not only did the National Geographic guide essentially ignore the field-mark system that Peterson perfected; it also covered all North American species in a single volume—the first field guide to do so. For a new generation interested in delving a little deeper into field identification, National Geographic’s eagle-emblazoned guide became the one to use. There’s no denying that The Sibley Guide to Birds, published in 2000, has once again turned the field-guide market on its head. Yet the National Geographic guide chugs along: there are more than 1.5 million copies in print, making it National Geographic’s best-selling trade book. In November 2002, National Geographic published the guide’s fourth edition. A bald eagle still graces the cover, though now its wings spread across a black, rather than white, background. Jonathan Alderfer, the guide’s art consultant, explains what else is new. What was your role as art consultant? Working with Jon Dunn, the chief consultant, my main role was to oversee the illustrations new to the fourth edition. Three artists painted five new plates: Peter Burke did the bitterns and night-herons on page 57; Thomas Schultz did the warblers on page 383; and I did the cormorants on page 55, the auklets on page 231, and the kingbirds on page 299. I also did new paintings of the rose-throated becard on page 303. Are there any other significant changes in the new edition? At the back of the guide, a new “quick-find” index helps users find a species without thumbing through lots of pages. More than 200 range maps have been updated—Paul Lehman, chief map consultant, contacted experts across the country to ensure that the guide reflects everything we currently know about bird distribution in North America. Likewise, we’ve made the guide consistent with the latest taxonomy of the American Ornithologists’ Union. For example, we now treat the black-crested titmouse as a full species; formerly, it was considered a subspecies of the tufted titmouse. What sets the guide apart? It offers fairly detailed coverage of all North American birds in a single, portable volume. Included are extreme rarities you won’t find in other guides, such as the Old World Flycatchers on page 343, most of which have shown up only a very few times in Alaska. Birders are interested in such species, no matter how remote the possibility of seeing them. Why are there no arrows pointing to field marks? I wasn’t involved with the first edition, but I suspect arrows weren’t used so that the guide would offer a clear alternative to Roger Tory Peterson’s popular bird guides, which rely heavily on the field-mark system. Subsequent revisions of the National Geographic guide have been consistent with that approach. Opposite the illustrations, the guide has a block of text describing each species. Does it rely too much on words? Some field guides lean more heavily on illustrations than text; ours strikes a balance. Jon Dunn, the primary author of our text descriptions, is one of the best birders in North America, and he has a talent for succinctly conveying his encyclopedic knowledge. In what medium do the artists work? Most use a combination of transparent and opaque watercolors, and their original works are about twice the size of the printed plates. How detailed are the illustrations? I would say that generally we try to match the details a birder would see when looking at a fairly close bird through high-quality binoculars. In my kingbird plate (page 299), I added distant views that show the patterns of flying birds. In the two species at the bottom of that plate, I illustrated the tips of the primary feathers as they’d appear through a spotting scope. In some of the best guides, one person does the writing and illustrating—Roger Tory Peterson and David Allen Sibley are the best-known examples. The National Geographic guide, however, contains the work of 21 artists. How do you achieve a consistent look with so many contributors? Every plate has roughly the same number of images, and there’s usually some indication of habitat—branches, leaves, grass, sand, water. Our artists have similar styles, they depict a similar degree of detail, and they know they’re part of a collaborative work. Before going ahead with a painting, they submit sketches for approval. All the images of a single species must be visually unified, and every such grouping must be sufficiently isolated from the groupings of adjacent species. This makes for a consistent visual presentation. What bird guides do you admire? I started with a Peterson guide but don’t look at it much now, because the advanced information that interests me is better presented elsewhere. Beginners and intermediate birders, however, can gain a lot from Peterson. James Coe’s Eastern Birds is a terrific starting guide to the more common species—too bad there isn’t a companion guide to the West. I find The Sibley Guide to Birds very useful—David Sibley is a very good artist, he knows North American birds really well, and he’s able to present what he knows, including geographic variations within a species. Peter Pyle’s Identification Guide to North American Passerines, written mainly for bird banders, has detailed information on determining the sex and age of perching birds. Birds of Europe by Killian Mullarney and others has excellent annotated art with very well-written text—it’s one of the best field guides. Who is the audience for the National Geographic guide? Because it covers all of North America and includes lots of information on rare birds, I would say it’s aimed at the intermediate to advanced birder. How do you explain the guide’s success? A lot of people are interested in birds. People who see birds around their houses want a field guide, and National Geographic’s is a very good one. When it first came out, it was the guide to have if you were a moderately serious birder, and I think that’s still true for anyone who wants a guide that’s equally strong textually and artistically. Do you fee competitive with other guides? I’m more competitive with myself. With each new painting, I want to surpass my previous efforts. I have my own ideas about what a page of bird illustrations should look like, but there’s room for other approaches. I wish everybody else good luck; we all have our audiences. —RW
With so many illustrations, including flight poses and identifiable variations of species, The Sibley Guide is much larger than competitors like The National Geographic Field Guide and Roger Tory Peterson’s classic Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America. But size and a correspondingly hefty $35 cover price haven’t hurt sales: about 700,000 copies of The Sibley Guide are in print. (In a nod to portability, Sibley Guide publisher Alfred A. Knopf will come out with eastern and western versions in the spring of 2003.) Although heavy on artwork—the highly variable red-tailed hawk, for example, required some 40 paintings—in other respects The Sibley Guide seems guided by the philosophy that less is more. Generally, it depicts only two species per page, with illustrations of each placed within a wide column, against a white background. A brief description introduces each bird, and labeled pointers show the field marks of adults (in breeding and nonbreeding plumages), juveniles, and distinguishable populations. Each column ends with a short paragraph on voice, and a range map. The consistent depiction of the flying bird at the top of each column was an innovation for a North American guide, and Sibley peppered his roomy pages with nuances of identification that wouldn’t have fit into a book of typical field guide dimensions. Few people lug The Sibley Guide into the field—it’s a reference better left at home or in the car, used to resolve identifications that elude a true field guide. Having a good bird guide is one thing; using it well is another. Like high-quality binoculars, a good guide is a sharp tool, but it won’t be very useful unless you bring something to the equation. David Sibley’s latest book, Sibley’s Birding Basics, concentrates on the human side of field identification.
The section on field skills, for example, contains this advice: “Watch the edges of a flock and pay special attention to outlying birds or those that act differently; these may be different species.” Later in the same section, Sibley explains how flock movements indicate the presence of a hawk: “Many small birds react to an aerial predator by forming a tight flock and swerving back and forth around it, not allowing it to get above them or to single out one member of the flock.” On the challenges of birding, Sibley commiserates: “Identification is like a matching game with a time limit,” he says. “On one side you have images in a book or in your head, and on the other side you have a bunch of flitting, skulking birds.” And on “pishing”—trying to attract birds by imitating their alarm calls—he mildly scolds: “Pishing can be overdone.” The chapter on the challenges of bird identification explains how to differentiate similar species, such as the downy and the hairy woodpecker. It also touches on identifying birds by their “jizz,” birding parlance for the unique impression a species conveys, even when glimpsed for a fraction of a second. For me, Sibley’s notes on misidentification are the most interesting. He explains how incorrect assumptions and a form of peer pressure led him and other experienced birders initially to misidentify New Jersey’s first record of a calliope hummingbird. A similar “group hysteria,” he adds, gripped hundreds of birders in California, who for days mistakenly took a skylark for a Smith’s longspur. If at times you’ve puzzled over birds you know well, Sibley will help you see why that’s only natural. A high-contrast background makes a bird appear larger. So does fog. In dim light, however, a bird appears smaller. Lighting conditions, reflective surfaces, and backgrounds influence the intensity of a bird’s colors. As they adjust to changes in temperature and wind speed, birds alter their posture, and by flexing muscles at the feather bases, they puff or flatten their plumage. Such adjustments can seem to affect not only a bird’s size, but also its proportions and color patterns. Sibley covers flight behavior, vocalizations, and feathers, devoting more pages to feathers—their structure, growth, and arrangement, and how they shape and pattern a bird—than to any other topic. The chapter on molt is difficult but reasonably short, so I read it twice for a better grasp of the somewhat esoteric Humphrey-Parkes system of molts, which Sibley deems essential to an understanding of age and plumage variation. The cover of Sibley’s Birding Basics describes it as book that will tell you how to identify birds. That’s fair enough, but as Sibley writes in the first chapter, “The methods and clues I put forth will be meaningful only after you have had some personal experience with them. The book covers some of the larger concepts; refining the ideas and filling in the details is up to the individual.” In other words, read the book and let the advice percolate. Then grab your binoculars and get out in the field. —RW
Lars Svensson is the author or coauthor of several field guides, including Identification Guide to European Passerines. Peter J. Grant, whose books include Gulls: An Identification Guide, died in 1990, an indication of this compendium's lengthy gestation. The 3,500 illustrations by Irish artist Killian Mullarney and Swedish artist Dan Zetterström are fairly lifelike, showing major plumage variations of every species; perching, feeding, and flying attitudes; and hints of characteristic habitat. Placing captions on the plates, right next to their respective field-mark pointers, is a nice touch, and presenting birds in similar stances allows ready comparison of confusing species. However, the illustrations are smaller than those in comparable North American guides. Contrasting colors mitigate the tiny size of the maps, which outline breeding, wintering, and migration ranges. Abundance symbols tell how commonly a species occurs in Great Britain and Ireland; the common buzzard, for example, is an "rB3" species—resident, breeding, and fairly abundant. American readers who think of bird size in terms of inches will gain little from the length and wingspan measurements, given in centimeters. Taxonomy and nomenclature closely follow that in Beaman's Palearctic Birds (1994). Virtually nothing is said about a species' conservation status, a glaring omission. Although the book's introduction is a model of brevity, the species-account text opposite each plate is thorough to a fault. The identification sections are often very long, understandably so for highly variable birds of prey and four-year gulls, but even "easy" species are no snap with Birds of Europe. Still, anyone even remotely interested in European birds should have this guide. It gives experienced
birders most, if not all, of the details in a reasonably portable package. Others
will use it as an at-home reference—backup for a simpler, smaller guide
carried in the field, such as Kightley, Madge, and Nurney's Pocket Guide to the Birds of
Britain and North-West Europe ($20). —RW Copyright © 2000-2002 Robert Winkler |
Princeton
Field Guides