On My Nightstand: National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America, 6th Edition

My first-ever birding guide was the National Geographic guide. Well, it technically wasn’t mine – I “borrowed” it from my (non-birding but inquisitive) parents when I first took an interest in identifying birds several years ago.

At the time, (around 2003), I had no idea how dynamic and fast-changing birding knowledge was, and I figured the dog-eared book that my parents had picked up on a whim many years earlier – which I now realize was the inaugural edition of the National Geographic guide from 1983 – was, like my high school algebra texts, a source of immutable truths. Little did I know that everything from the genetic relationships among birds to their common names to their ranges and populations was in constant flux.  I was puzzled as to why people called those gorgeous white raptors in our area “White-tailed Kites” when the guide said clearly that they were “Black-shouldered Kites.” 

I still have that guide, along with many other, newer ones – Kaufman, Sibley, Crossley, and several other, more specialized guides.  So when I was given the opportunity to check out the newest update of the National Geographic guide, I couldn’t resist comparing it to the original – the book that helped launch my life as a birder.

Both the similarities and differences between the original and latest update are striking: the same signature Bald Eagle on the cover, quite a few of the same illustrations, and even same descriptions. Both list the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker as “probably extinct,” but for strikingly different reasons. (The description of its range and distribution in the new guide will be heartbreaking to anyone who rejoiced at its putative rediscovery a few years back.) But new illustrations, very much in the same style as the older ones, also abound, as well as significantly expanded or revised descriptions of certain birds. (The description of White-crowned Sparrows in the 6^th edition, for instance, goes into helpful detail about their various subspecies, their songs, and distribution, which the original, shorter description lacked.)

Another useful detail the guide includes is an index of subspecies range maps – this can be a great benefit to those who spend a lot of time birding on the road.

More striking to me was the extremely liberal definition of “birds of North America” used in the book. Flipping through it, one sees dozens of accidental and even extinct species not found in other North American field guides.  I personally appreciated these graphic reminders that North America (or parts of it, at least) is closely linked, biologically and geographically, to the far corners of Asia and Northern Europe, and for any enthusiastic birder, this feature will be a tantalizing reminder that any trip to the field can bring unexpected surprises. But for beginners or others looking for a straight-ahead quick reference to birds one is likely to encounter on a typical trip, this expanded inventory could be a needless distraction. 

A characteristic feature of any field guide is the front matter – all the stuff the guide presents before actually getting to the birds themselves. Kaufman’s useful pocket guide, for instance, has a friendly, simple preface that captures a “birding for everyone” vibe, and the first words in the preface of Crossley’s graphically rich guide are “I don’t like text,” which tells you everything you need to know about the orientation of the rest of the book. The National Geographic guide strikes an accessible, yet serious tone in its front matter: the brief descriptions of bird classification, ranges, and field marks are written to be understandable to beginners, but include enough information (such as a two-page illustrated spread of labeled head, wing, and body feather tracts) to be a useful reference for more experienced birders as well.

 Any review of a field guide is supposed to end up with the answer to the question “so, how does this rank among the other guides for the same area?” I really hate answering this question because I don’t have a single favorite North American field guide – like many birders, I like having an assortment of them for different purposes: Kaufman to keep in my back pocket for quick reference, Sibley to keep in my car for more comprehensive ID checks, and Crossley to keep at home to study before and after looking for a new bird. Also, I often find myself needing more than one set of illustrations to ID a bird definitively, especially if it’s molting or in some transitional plumage. The new National Geographic guide, for me, falls into the “keep in the car” category – a great combination of quick reference and comprehensive description that will be a useful addition to my arsenal of references.

On My Night Stand: The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds

Cedar Waxwings from The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds.

Shortly after we first started birding, my husband and I saw an unusual hummingbird. It was mostly green and grayish underneath, like an immature Anna's Hummingbird (an expected and common species in southern California, where we lived at the time.) But unlike an Anna's, this bird had a distinctive golden crown, utterly unmistakable.

We didn't have a field guide with us, so we just stared at it for a few minutes, took several photos, then went home to figure out what its story was. And we drew a blank.

No hummingbird in either or our guides looked anything like our bird. There was an illustration of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird in one of them that showed some yellowish stuff on its head, but the build seemed wrong. Flummoxed, I posted the photo and a query on the Orange County Birding listserv. And the verdict was unanimous:

It was an immature Anna's Hummingbird. With pollen on its head.

Duh. It was, after all, feeding in a goldenrod bush, clearly visible in the photo.

The moral here is that birds don't always look like the canonical illustrations in field guides. This drove me nuts when I first started birding. (Sometimes, it still does.) Birds have an annoying tendency to move around, hold themselves in weird positions, or transition s-l-o-w-l-y from one plumage to another. They're no more likely to stand around all day in full profile view wearing canonical secondary plumage than are female homo sapiens to look like cover models in Vogue.

But for the past year or so, word was out that a new guide would change that. A few weeks back, I got my very own review copy of The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds in the mail and eagerly tore into it. Whoa.

Many, many far more knowledgeable birders than I have already reviewed Crossley's book, so I'll keep my comments fairly brief. As most have noted, Crossley deserves major props for originality--his is a bird ID guide that looks like no other. While most guides contain an illustration or two of each species, always in that nice full profile view or a top-down flight shot, Crossley dedicates a full page montage of half a dozen or more photographed birds (all from his own photos), each in a different position and plumage, to all but the rarest species.

If his plate of Cedar Waxwings doesn't give you a pretty good grip on what the bird can look like, both close up and at a distance, in flight and standing still, nothing will.

I field-tested the book once. (More precisely, I brought it with me in the trunk of my car to show off to a friend during a recent sparrow-hunting trip to La Chua--the book is way too large and heavy to be carried into the field.) Shortly past the trailhead, we saw a flock of sparrows we were unsure about--Vespers, perhaps, or maybe something else? In a winter sparrow hunts, it's way too easy to turn any expected bird into some exotic rarity. And the individual birds that gave us the best views, weirdly, posed themselves directly facing us so all we could see were their faces and bellies--were Vespers supposed to be that pale underneath? I honestly couldn't recall from any of my other field guides.

So we went back to my car, flipped open the Crossley guide to the sparrows and started looking. Almost all the plates showed frontal as well as side views of the birds, which was enormously helpful. One shot showed a bird that looked exactly like the puffed-up frontal view of the bird we just saw--a Vesper. Mystery solved.

Helpful and beautiful as the book is, it's not one I'd recommend as a sole resource for a beginning birder, although I'd definitely recommend it as a supplement to more accessible works such as the Kaufman guide. Because the photos take up so much space, there's little room for explanatory text. The ages and sexes of birds are labeled on some, but not all, of the plates--in his introduction, Crossley says this is intentional, so the reader can figure it out on his or her own. Much of the concise but useful explanatory text under the plates, as other reviewers have noted, contains banding ID abbreviations of bird names. For instance, part of the description under "Harris's Sparrow" reads "song like WTSP at one pitch." Aren't most newbies self-conscious and confused enough without having to figure out what WTSP means? Even experienced birders can get thrown by these--a local master told me he once spent hours staring at his list from the previous day, trying to figure out what the hell kind of sparrow a ROSP is. (Hint: he was birding in Florida.)

Oddly, even the labels under the individual birds shown in the comparative size guide at the beginning of the book -- a very useful feature -- are reduced to four-letter codes, even through there's more than enough space under each photo to print out the full common name. I can just picture some poor novice flipping through this, saying, "Honey, you know that pretty duck we saw at Kanapaha Gardens yesterday? It's called a Wodu!"

So what good is this book? If I had to carry something in my back pocket for quick reference on a day in the field, I'm sticking with my Sibley or Kaufman guides. But if I'm chasing something new, I'll be sure to get a good look at it in Crossley before setting out. And I'll be sure to keep Crossley in the trunk--or close at hand when I get home--for further study.