Wilmington Pied-billed Grebe

Bob Thobaben called me at 1045 this morning with the news that there was a Pied-billed Grebe at the duck pond in Denver Williams Park in Wilmington. (Click here for map.) I arrived at the pond about 1105 and despite the modest size of the pond, it took me 20 minutes to find the bird. It was feeding and spent only seconds on the surface before diving again. The small size of the pond and the ability of the grebe to swim long distances underwater meant that it could (and did) surface just about anywhere. In statistics, one would say that the point where it surfaced was not correlated with the point where it dove. Anyway, I could never predict where it would appear next, so that it sometimes took me as much as 20 minutes to reacquire the bird. The dozens of ducklings on the pond, the offspring of the numerous feral mallards did not help. They were roughly the same size and shape and I kept alerting on them. I have never worked so hard for a Pied-billed Grebe.

Peterjohn, in The Birds of Ohio, gives very few breeding locations for Pied-billed Grebe away from Lake Erie. There is certainly very little hope that this bird is likely to breed here, even if it should be so lucky as to find an equally errant mate.  Peterjohn writes, “Breeding Pied-billed Grebes are restricted to large marshes, particularly those exceeding ten acres in size, where dense emergent vegetation is interspersed with small openings.” It is thus exceedingly wondrous that this bird should appear on a tiny, manicured pond whose sole purpose is to provide a flock of tame waterfowl for the local children to feed bread crumbs to.

 

Ten minutes to meaningful maps

One of the most difficult parts of communicating the location of a good bird (or a good birding spot) is uncertainty about how much knowledge is shared between the parties. Between some interlocuters “the cedar tree by the side of the road where the long-eared owl was last year” is good enough. Others require turn-by-turn directions from their home 300 miles away. A couple of years ago, I thought GPS was the answer. I would specify the coordinates and GPS-equipped birders would be able to navigate there directly. Unfortunately, the technology has progressed so rapidly that lats and longs have been completely bypassed. Maybe OnStar can get you to a set of coordinates, but most car GPS receivers are all visual; they don’t have any means of entering target coordinates. The obvious answer is some kind of map, but most of the online mapping services suffer from the same shortcoming.

But now there is My Maps from Google. My Maps lets you annotate and save a map from Google Local and send a link to it to all your friends. The map has all of the interactive functionality of the basic Google Local. I can use it to indicate a spot in a local wildlife area, and when you click on it, you can zoom out, click on your house, get directions and all the things you normally expect. This same map is just as useful to a birder in Cincinnati as it is to one in Cleveland. And best of all, it is dead simple, all drag and drop, and no programming. It only takes about ten minutes to achieve a reasonable level of skill. I wish all software were like that.

To get started, point your browser to Google Local . You should get a display that looks something like this:

This one is centered on my house just north of Wilmington, Ohio. Yours is probably centered on someplace in your neck of the woods.

Look at the tabs on the left. Click on “My Maps” as below. For now, resist the temptation to click on “Create new map.” First you want to zero in on the target area for your map, because that is the first thing your reader will see. We will use the pan and zoom controls indicated by the red arrows below to move the focus to Cowan Lake State Park, one of my favorite local birding spots. First, I will zoom out to get some perspective, as in the figure at right below.

Look in the bottom left hand corner. There is Cowan Lake. Now we need to center it and zoom in to make it a pretty picture. We do this with the cross-shaped controls on the left. There is also an undocumented method that is very handy for this sort of thing. Place the cursor on the lake and double click. Google centers on that point and zooms in by one increment. In any case, a couple of clicks should get us a map like the one below. Now, click on “Create new map.”

The cursor is in the title box on the left. You can enter a title and a short description of the map and what it is supposed to do. This gives us the basic map, we can begin to annotate it. Just to the right of the pan and zoom controls, you will see four icons that weren’t there before. The first (leftmost) of these is a little hand. This control essentially duplicates the pan control. You can use it to grab the map and move it. Just click on the hand, then click and drag the map. The next three are the three basic means of annotating the map. The little balloon annotates a point; the jagged line allows you to draw consecutive line segments on the map; and the last gives you way of drawing a colored polygon on the map. Let’s annotate a few points since that is the control you will probably be using most.

One of my favorite birding spots at Cowan Lake is the east boat ramp on the south shore. To annotate this spot, click on the balloon icon and drag it over to the desired spot as below.

When you let go of the mouse button, an annotation panel appears. Click in the title box and enter an appropriate title. Then click in (or tab into) the description box and write as much description as you think your readers might find useful. When you are done, click OK. The annotation panel goes away, but the icon, the title and the first line or two of the text appear in the panel to the left of the map. Clicking on the title brings back the annotation. If we continue in this way, dragging and dropping the balloons on various points, we build up an map rich in information. Not only that, but the map retains all the functionality of the basic Google Maps utility. I can zoom out to Sacramento and get turn-by-turn directions to the east boat ramp. This flexibility is the great power of My Maps.

But wait, there’s more. Lurking under the annotation panel are a whole slew of additional symbols that give interesting possibilities. Look at the figure at right. I have put a marker on the Lotus Cove Trail Head, but that is not a birding spot. It is just a place to park. I can distinguish that by changing the icon to something more suitable.

I do this in the following way. In the panel to the left of the map, I click on Lotus Cove Trail Head. This brings up the annotation I created earlier. Click on “Edit.” This recovers the annotation dialog, from which I can make whatever changes I wish. Now I click on the balloon icon in the upper right corner. When I do that, a new panel appears that gives me the choice of about a hundred new symbols. I scroll down and choose the capital “P” for parking and the change is made

The map below shows what you can do with this. I have added a tent to indicate where the campground is, and a little sailboat to show the location of the marina, and an exclamation point to warn that an indicated road is actually private. Finally, Google Maps isn’t too good about including internal roads in the park, so I have used the line drawing tool to draw in the roads down to the beach and to the Big Hill picnic grounds. These are two of the best areas in the park and deserve the extra attention.

Finally, we need a way to make this map available to others. Google gives each map a URL so it is accessible to anyone who has the address. You can bring this address up by clicking on “Link to this page” in the upper right corner of the map.

When you do this, the URL appears in the address box of your browser. From here you can copy it and paste it into an e-mail or make it a link on a web page, like this one. I have done that with the finished map, which you can see by clicking here.

A couple of final words. First, making these maps is a web application and as with most web applications, it is excruciatingly slow if you are on a dial-up connection. Even with a broadband connection, it is not nearly as fast as a dedicated application that runs directly on your computer, like your word processor. Success requires a little patience.  The spplication is also a bit balky sometimes. I figure it is because every mouse click must be sent out over the web and a response must be sent back and some of them just go astray. One important corollary of this is that you must save your work early and often, as we used to do in the olden days. Google tries to save after every change, but sometimes the magic just doesn’t work. You have to take responsibility for it yourself.

 

Close encounters of the absurd kind

Yes, that’s a California Condor on the left, and no, the photographer is not a professional ornithologist, and no, this is not is some barely accessible wilderness.  In fact, the Pacific Coast Highway is only about 20 meters behind the photographer and there are about a dozen other people awaiting their turn for the condor photo op.

This is a far cry from my previous encounter with a condor.  In 1982, I and two of my sons decided to make a try for the condors.  We drove from Alamogordo, New Mexico, and camped on the top of Mount Pinos overlooking the Sespe Valley, the site of the last wild condor population.  We were prepared to spend five days on Mount Pinos waiting for a condor.  The first morning was great condor-watching conditions: clear skies and a million miles visibility.

After a couple of hours we had accumulated a nice little group of would-be condor watchers, but no condors. One of the group was an experienced condor finder and he told us that the way to attract condors was for one of the party to lie down on the ground and twitch from time to time. After a while, my son Hugh decided to give it a try.

Shortly thereafter, a speck appeared on the horizon. We watched it carefully. The wing posture was consistent with condor, but it could have been an eagle. As it drew closer, excitement grew as the bird took a “double dip” flap, a condor flight characteristic. By this time, it was apparent that the bird was very far away and was thus much larger than an eagle. A small bird was harrying the condor.

We watched all the way in. Judging from the amount of white under the wings, the bird was probably two or three years old. It finally passed right by us, about 100 feet away and at eye level. The little bird that was harrying the condor was a Red-tailed Hawk. It was a thrilling encounter, well worth the 900 mile drive.

The Sespe population continued to decline.  The last remaining individuals were rounded up in 1987 and entered into a captive breeding program at the San Diego Zoo.  The program was successful in producing new condors and in 2003,  condors began to be released into the wild.  There are now four free-flying condor populations in Southern California, Northern California, Arizona, and Baja California.

Now, as much as I enjoyed getting up close and personal with these condors, I cannot help but think that this may not be the best way to bring back a famously endangered species.  These birds are part of the Ventana Wilderness population.  I am confident that No. 4 (top picture) is an adult, and judging from the lack of black on the heads of the two above, they are probably also adults, or nearly so.  But what are they doing hanging out with people?

Local experts state that condors are very predictable along this stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, 40-50 miles south of Monterey. They have apparently made their way from the wilderness where they breed to the clifftops by the sea, where presumably they are foraging along the shoreline. It is a puzzle to me what they can be foraging on since condors are large carrion specialists, though it has been suggested that they are feeding on carcasses in seal and sea lion rookeries.

The fact that they are so approachable indicates that they are habituated to human contact seems to me to be worrisome. Recently, bottle tops and other human detritus have been implicated in the deaths of some young condors in this very population.  (The Vermillion Cliffs population in Arizona, which is considerably further removed from concentrations of humanity than these birds, has not to my knowledge suffered similar losses.)

I don’t see what can be done about it really- condors will be condors and if they want dramatic sea views, there is little we can do to stop them. However, this tendency may presage the ultimate failure of this population. Restoration money is so hard to come by, even for a big box-office species like the condor, that a highly public failure may lead to a loss of confidence in the ability of scientists to carry out projects like this. The ramifications could be far-reaching and severe.

 

Notable number of Cowan Caspians

 Caspian Terns occur fairly regularly in Southwest Ohio, but generally only in onesies and twosies. Larry Gara called me yesterday afternoon (18 Apr 07) to tell me that he had found ten on the beach at Cowan Lake State Park. (See the post immediately following for a description and an interactive map.) I went out to the lake immediately and found seven still present. I was able to get a photo with five Caspian Terns in the same frame.

Note the size relationship with the Ring-billed Gulls.

In stalking the birds to get better pictures of the birds, I managed to spook them, but my ineptitude resulted in a couple of nice flight pictures.

Note the usual pattern of very light upper surfaces of the wing with the very dark lower surfaces.  This can be a good mark in distinguishing Caspians from Royals in flight, should we ever be so lucky as to be in that position here in Ohio.

Larry reports that none were found this morning.

 

Cowan Lake Waterfowl Study- 2005

Ohio has the misfortune of sitting between two major flyways. Despite this, forty species of waterfowl (Anseriformes) are known to occur in Ohio and large numbers of ducks and geese regularly pile up along the state’s 150 miles of Lake Erie shoreline. However, large flights of waterfowl in the interior of the state are much less prevalent. In an attempt to shed some light on waterfowl migration patterns in the interior, I have embarked on a program of systematically counting the ducks and geese using a large lake in southwestern Ohio.  This article reports the result of 2005, the first year of the study.

Cowan Lake is a 700 acre lake about seven miles southwest of Wilmington in Clinton County. The lake was formed in 1950 by damming Cowan Creek. It is the centerpiece of Cowan Lake State Park. A full description is here.  The DeLorme map reference is p.77 D5.   An interactive, annotated map is here.

This season (winter 2005) I tried with some success to count the waterfowl on Cowan Lake every day that weather permitted. Cowan Lake is small enough that all the birds on the lake can be counted in six stops along the south shore, accessible from OH 350. Counting usually took about an hour and I tried to time my visits for the last hour before sunset.  I included grebes and cormorants in the counts because they are not Anseriformes, they do seem to follow the same migration patterns.  The waterfowl numbers given below are a summary of those counts.

Cowan’s contribution to waterfowl migration was limited by the constraints of open water conditions during the early weeks and by human use when the weather warmed up. Before 15 Feb there was too much ice for the counts to be representative. On the other hand, waterfowl concentrations are very sensitive to human use of the lake. Waterfowl numbers nose-dived with even three or four boats on the lake. After 5 Apr, human traffic on the lake precluded use by more than a handful of waterfowl, and most of those were the Canada Geese and Mallards that breed there.

Aggregating the numbers of waterfowl gives a partial picture of the main thrust of waterfowl migration. In the chart above, aggregated numbers are plotted on against a linear scale. Plotting the data against a semilog scale, as below, gives a better picture of usage. From this chart it is easy to see that during the period there were usually several hundred waterfowl on the lake on days that were conducive to taking data. Note that a zero on this chart indicates that no count was made on that date. From these charts, it is evident that two big pushes occurred, one between 8 Mar and 16 Mar and one between 23 Mar and 31 Mar.

It is also interesting to plot the number of species observed each day. From the chart below, I conclude that the on days where there are a lot of birds, there are also a lot of species. Apparently, a good migration day is good for most species. However, in general, the number of species is a somewhat less variable than the number of individuals. This is partly because some species tend to migrate a little earlier or a little later than others. No good trends emerge from this one year’s data, but as I replicate this study in future years, this picture should become clearer.

 

New resource for raptor mavens

In the April edition of the Ornithological Newsletter (organ of the Ornithological Societies of North America), there is an announcement of a new service provided by USGS, the Raptor Information Service (RIS). The RIS contains citations on over 38,000 items concerning raptors, including “gray literature” reports and unpublished government reports. It is available to all comers here

I gave it a test drive this morning and the results were mixed. I entered “merlin ohio” as keywords and the system quickly found five items that matched those criteria, one of them going back to 1909. I picked up a copy of the winter 2006 issue of the Journal of Field Ornithology that happened to be lying around the lab, and entered “white-throated hawk Argentina” to see if the system would return an article in that journal. It did so in about 10 seconds, along with seven other articles on White-throated Hawks in Argentina. This indicates that the database is certainly extensive. I haven’t tried it on any Old World species, though.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the citation is all you get. There is no information on where you might by able to find the referenced article, even when the journal is available online. Ideally, a mouse click should take you to the article. The inclusion of gray literature is laudable, but the whole difficulty with gray literature is that it is almost impossible to find. The people who put it into the database had to have found it somewhere; it would have been really nice to have included that information in the database.

(White-throated Hawk by Christian Gonzalez Bulo) 

 

Appropriate blather for a first post

This is not my first attempt at a blog, but I sincerely hope it will be the last.  The idea is to share some of my thoughts (and, hopefully, insights) on the natural world.  Some of these thoughts will be ruminations on the past, which encompasses among other things almost fifty years of more or less serious birdwatching, a broad range of scientific endeavors in several fields, and some current research.  I am interested to see if this medium can allow an old dog to execute this new trick without straining its mind to learn yet another computer language.  My cranial hard disk is full and badly in need of defragging.  We’ll see.  I may have to become an HTML hacker after all.

 

Juvenal/First Winter Forster’s Terns

of the biggest challenges of my first year of birdwatching almost fifty years ago was separating young Forster’s Terns from young Common Terns. And so it remains today. I find myself going back to the books every time I encounter one or the other. I had another opportunity to do just that yesterday (9 Oct 06) when I encountered 25 juvenile/first winter Forster’s Terns on the beach at Caesar Creek State Park. (Directions)

I can state without equivocation that these birds were Forster’s and not Common because they were quite vocal and the two species are easily distinguished by call. But looking at birds I knew to be Forster’s Terns, I nevertheless experienced some confusion about several ID points. So I whipped out my trusty Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 and fired off about 200 pictures. Here are the most instructive. Click on the picture or on the link for a bigger view.

As far I was could see all 25 of the observed birds fell between the two extremes shown above. The bird in the foreground is still substantially in juvenal plumage. Truly juvenal birds would show a gingery fringe to most of the mantel feathers, scapulars and wing coverts and a dark brown cap. The fringes are all gone now and most of the back shows newly molted gray feathers. The tertials are very dark and there are still some dark-centered median coverts. The head is in the process of losing the dark feathers of forehead, crown and nape. The structure of “mask” is already evident.

The bird in the background looks very much like a basic plumaged adult, but the nape of the neck usually retains some of the darker feathers of the juvenal plumage. (The nape of the basic plumaged adult is pretty much pure white.) The flight pattern shows differences, as well, as shown in some of the pictures below.

This collection of birds shows the range of head markings present at this date. The bird numbered “1″ still shows substantially the head markings of the juvenal plumage, whereas, bird “2″ shows an almost completely white forehead, crown and nape, give the masked pattern which many birders use as a diagnostic indication of Forster’s Tern. The partial hood of the birds in the earlier molt stage could easily lead to confusion with basic plumaged Common Tern.

Common Terns reliably show a carpal bar in all plumages except alternate. The photos above show that in juvenile/first winter plumage the Forster’s Tern shows some dark scapulars that might be mistaken for a carpal bar. The carpal bar of the Common Tern is due to dark coverts in the patagial area and has a different look.

First winter Forster’s Terns in flight. The light-colored primaries are similar to those of the adults, but it must be noted that the wings of the first winter Common Tern lack the dark wedges that characterize the adults. This nullifies one of the best ways of separating adult Forster’s and Common Terns. However, the first year Forster’s lacks the dark carpal bar and the dark gray secondaries of the Common Tern

The tail is also subtly different. Note the dark markings on the inner webs of the outer two or three rectices. The detail here shows this a little more clearly. Common Tern shows a dark outer web on the outer tail feathers only. This is a significant difference, but one that is hard to spot in the field.

 

A beginner’s guide to binoculars

The one piece of equipment that is absolutely indispensable to a birdwatcher is a good pair of binoculars. I can say this from experience. The first year of my birding career was spent without binoculars and without a bird book. I used to stalk birds and take careful notes, then go to the county library to look up the birds in their ancient copy of Peterson. I learned a lot that way, but when I graduated from high school my parents gave me a pair of binoculars and my birding mentor gave me my own copy of Peterson and it changed my whole life.

Buying a pair of binoculars

There are lots of reviews of binoculars on the web. In addition, Birding magazine runs reviews about once a year. My rule of thumb is very simple:

Buy the most expensive pair of binoculars you can afford.
Do not go cheap.

The reason is also simple. The cheaper binoculars have surprisingly good optics. Modern computers have taken a lot of the artistry out of optical design and manufacturing. However, the structural robustness of a pair of binoculars is another matter. Many cheaper optics are designed for a life cycle that does not at all reflect the usage that an active birder will put on his binoculars. Virtually any binoculars offered by discount houses or sporting goods houses are designed for the casual user. They are made for people who will use them at horse races and football games, perhaps 10-20 hours per year under benign conditions. An active birder will put a lifetime of use on this sort of optics in about a year. After that time, things will start to go wrong and most of them will be irreparable.I went through about six pairs of progressively more expensive binoculars while learning this lesson. I pass it on to you for free.

In my experience, the threshold of utility for a pair of binoculars is about $350 (in 2006 dollars). At this level, one begins to encounter binoculars with very nice optics and reasonably sturdy construction made by reputable firms with reasonable warranties and effective support capability. If something goes wrong, you can get it fixed. There are nevertheless two points that you will want to satisfy yourself on which vary widely among optics at this level. These are eye relief and close focusing.

Eye relief is important for eyeglass wearers, who need long eye relief (big number) because they are essentially holding the binoculars further away from their eyes. If you wear eyeglasses, don’t try to use the binoculars without them. It just gets to be too much of a hassle. I know because I resisted it for years after age drove me to reading glasses. It doesn’t take much effort to learn to use eyeglasses and binoculars together. You should do it.

Close focusing is pretty much self-explanatory. If you are lucky enough (or skillful enough) to get into close quarters with a small bird, you want to be able to take maximum advantage of the experience. It doesn’t seem like much, but having to take a step or two back from a good bird is really galling. I would like to be able to focus on my toes. Unfortunately, my Leicas won’t do that, but that is what I would like.

When you get up to the $1000 level, the optics are so superb that I cannot distinguish any differnece among them. At this level, any binocular will give you light, bright, colorful images that snap into focus. And those superb optics come in a chassis you can practically drive nails with. At this level, you can confidently expect that your binoculars will outlive you. If you can stretch your budget to one of these wonderful instruments, do it. The only criterion you need consider is personal comfort. Pick the one that feels best to you, sits in your hands nicely, comes readily to your eyes, and complements your personal style.

How much power?

Binocular manufacturers use two numbers to characterize their models. The first one is the power. This is the amount of magnification. This is a linear scale: a binocular with twice the power makes the image look twice as big. The other number in the specification is the diameter of the objective lens (the one closest to the bird). Thus a 10 x 42 binocular is ten power with a 42 mm objective lens. The significance of the objective lens is its light-gathering power. A bigger objective gathers more light and generally gives a brighter, more pleasing image. Note that the ability to gather light is a function of the area of the lens, and is thus proportional to the square of the diameter of the lens. Simply put, a lens with twice as big a diameter with gather four times as much light. So even a small difference in the size of the objective is significant.

There are two basic designs of binoculars, porro prism and roof prism. Porro prism binoculars are the kind that you see submarine skippers using in old WWII movies. Roof prism binoculars look like two telescopes lashed together.   Examples of both are given below.

An example of a porro prism binocular.  Shown are the Bushnell NatureView 10 x 42.

.

.

An example of a roof prism binocular.  This is the Leica BN 10 x 42.  Even though the porro prism binocular above has the same power and objective, the Leicas will give a brighter, contrastier image and be lighter and easier to handle as well.

Today, there is little point in going for porro prism binoculars. The roof prism design contains fewer elements, has fewer internal reflections (where light is lost), and weighs less.The old rule of thumb for porro prism binoculars was that the objective diameter should be five times the power. Thus, the popular sizes were 6 x 30, 7 x 35, and 8 x 40. There were some 10 x 50s around, but they were so heavy that few could hold them steady. Roof prism designs are more efficient, so you can combine higher power with a smaller objective and still get superior image quality. The two dominant design points these days are 8 x 42 and 10 x 42. It sounds contradictory, but it’s not, really.

Both designs have strengths that play to different types of birding.The 8 x 42s are lighter, easier to point, and have a very bright image. They come into their own in close quarters, under closed canopies, or when chasing small, agile birds. The 10 x 42s are preferred by birders who are particularly interested in waterfowl, shorebirds, gulls and terns, hawks, seabirds, and birds of the open spaces: savannahs, grasslands, deserts and salt marshes. In these environments, the narrower field of view is not a problem and the ambient light levels are usually high enough to give a plenty bright picture.

So it comes down to a matter of what kind of birding you do and how much you can spend. Isn’t that true of life in general?

 Where to buy

Birding has become sufficiently popular that many businesses have sprung up to provide goods and services to birders. However, I would urge you to buy your binoculars (and just about everything else you need) someplace where it will do more than simply enrich the stockholders. Two of the best are the American Birding Association and the American Bird Conservancy. Both are worthwhile organizations, both offer top quality goods at very good prices, and both plow the profits back into the programs of the organizations. So if you are ready to pony up some bucks for a nice pair of glasses, check out ABA Sales and the ABC Nature Mall.

 

A beginner’s guide to field guides

A beginning birder recently asked my advice on which field guide to invest in.  Certainly, a good reference is absolutely essential for learning the birds.  It is thus one of the first acquisitions of birding gear.  Here is a list of the more popular choices, roughly in my order of preference, together with ten-cent reviews.

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds
ISBN-13: 978-0679428527

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.  Comes in eastern and western versions and fits in a back pocket.

Stokes Field Guide to Birds by Donald and Lillian Stokes
ISBN-13: 978-0316818094

Very popular due to the visibility of the authors from their PBS series. Written for popular tastes, but not authoritative in any way. Illustrations are photos and leave a lot to be desired.  The emphasis seems to be on getting a pretty picture, rather than covering all the information necessary to make a good identification in all seasons and in all phases of the bird’s life.  The text is way too simplistic, and the text is one of the most important elements for a beginner.  This guide also comes in an eastern and a western edition.  Reasonably easy to carry.

Birds of North America: A Guide To Field Identification, by Chandler S. Robbins , Bertel Bruun, Herbert S. Zim, Arthur Singer (Illustrator)
ISBN-13: 978-1582380902

Many birders know this as the “Golden Guide,” as it appeared as part of the Golden Books series of the 50s and 60s.  The Golden books were primarily for the children’s market, but the Golden Guide or the “Robbins Guide,” as many called it, was a startling departure.  It was the first field guide to challenge the monopoly of the Peterson guides.  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.  All of its innovations eventually became standard, not only in the US, but all around the world.  Sadly, it has not kept pace and is rarely used by serious birders today.

All the Birds of North America : American Bird Conservancy’s Field Guide by Jack L. Griggs
ISBN-13: 978-0062730282

Despite bearing the imprimatur of the American Bird Conservancy, this field guide can really only recommended as an additional source. It is organized according to habitat and food choices, rather than taxonomic order. This often sounds sensible to beginners, but such systems have been tried before and they have always come to grief because birds just don’t separate that easily on those characters. Thus you get closely related birds in distant sections of the book. Most beginners find taxonomic order confusing and difficult to catch on to, but it really is the only way to organize birds. (I am planning an installment of taxonomic order in the near future.) The author attempts to use a system of icons to denote a number of characteristics such as preferred food, nest site and constructin, etc., but it just adds to the confusion.

A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America by Virginia Marie Peterson , Roger Tory Peterson (Series Editor)
ISBN-13: 978-0395740460

Originally written by the dean of American bird-watching, the guy that invented the field guide in 1934, the version is posthumously updated by his widow and a number of well-qualified editors.  Long the acknowledged guru, in his later years 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.  This 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.

Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America   
ISBN-13: 978-0618574230

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.  This technique fails to properly capture the impact of color.  The illustrations have the lok and feel of a colorized black-and-white movie.  Kaufman’s book 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.

National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, Fifth Edition
ISBN-13: 978-0792253143

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 in the east 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, although the fifth edition shows some improvement in that regard.  This volume is at the limit of luggability.

The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America by David Allen Sibley
ISBN-13: 978-0679451211

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.

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. Maybe not all at once, but most birders eventually wind up with a lot of field guides. Sooner or later, you will come across a problem that one of them treats better than the others and you will be glad you had the additional resource.

Where to buy

Most local bookstores will carry at least one of these titles. A big box bookstore will probably have three or four. Amazon.com has them all. But if you can stand to wait a day or two, I would recommend buying from the American Birding Association (ABA Sales) or the American Bird Conservancy Nature Mall. Prices are competitive and the profit gets cycled back into the organization’s programs.