Mostly dark bill a bit odd for HERG by 2nd cycle, bill seemed heavier than HERG, too, with a bit more pronounced gonydeal expansion??
Slopplily marked bill with wide black tip, black running to gape along tomia and transitioning to dirty pinkish proximal end above & below tomia.
Irides dark (darkish? can't be absolutely sure they aren't black.)
Breast mottled like young GWGU. Mantle & scups pretty clean gray about same as HERG or RBGU. Otherwise reminds me of what Steve Howell says about 2nd-cycle GWGU: "Overall dirty aspect..."
Overall upperparts tone (aside from clean gray mantle/scaps) a grayish-brown, weakly marked coverts.
Wing projection HERG-ish, primaries silvery brownish-gray underneath, med. gray-brown above (look darker in shadow but kind of palish in sun.) No obvious secondary bar that I could pick out. General underwing pattern a helluvalot like GWGU imho.
Size = (or essentially so) to nearby HERG, smaller than nearby Nelson's Gull.
I'm thinking Glaucous-winged one parent but upper surface of primaries too dark, wings a bit longish, bill not quite savage enough, etc.??
2nd parent HERG? Or should I be considering Glaucous-winged x Western (much to compare here with GWGU x WEGU examples in Howell & Dunn)??
My supposition that the bird was a 2nd-cycle Glaucous-winged x Herring Gull hybrid was supported by details in Howell & Dunn's Gulls of the Americas and by several of my larophile friends- I especially liked Steve Mlodinow's comment, "To me, it looks like a hefty Thayer's Gull, and that is precisely what many GW x Herring Gulls look like." While this taxon is pretty frequently encountered on the West Coast, there is a paucity of records from inland states. How much of this is due to their rarity vs. them sneaking by undetected is an interesting point to ponder.
See what you think! All images digiscoped 20 February 2012, Broomfield County, Colorado (click to enlarge.)
They keep telling me this has been the mildest winter in memory here in north Jersey. For this hothouse flower, it's been a long one and cold, and March has brought no relief so far. I've been seeking refuge in slippers and hot chocolate--and in field guides to warmer portions of the globe.
And what better place to dream of than a trio of tropical islands? Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire lie just off the northern coast of Venezuela, and their avifauna--most of it shared across all three islands--has an exotic flair. While these small arid islands lie between two major routes for neotropical migrants, they are still home to such warm-climate treasures as the Caribbean Coot and the Yellow-shouldered Parrot, along with endemic subspecies of both Barn and Burrowing Owls.
Before the appearance of this new field guide, birders both visiting and resident would have used Steve Hilty's Venezuela or Restall's Northern South America, both books monumental in their coverage, their detail, and their bulk. A handy half inch thick, this new volume comes in some 2,200 pages and several pounds under its bulkier competitors, already reason enough for praise.
In addition to its overview of the islands' geology, climate, history, and politics, the Introduction offers a concise site guide to 21 of the region's best birding localities. Particularly notable are wetlands supporting the largest populations of American Flamingos in the southern Caribbean; these areas were among the first half dozen Ramsar sites designated in the western hemisphere.
A field guide rises or falls with its illustrations. The paintings here, all by Robin Restall and many of them taken over from Birds of Northern South America, are not the book's great strength. It's probably unfair to hold any field guide illustrator to the standard set by Guy Tudor, but there are not a few cases where the illustration of a bird I know well is close to unidentifiable, raising concerns about the accuracy of the depictions of species I am not familiar with. The occasional caption errors don't help matters: Black and Chimney Swifts are reversed, and several fall "Dendroica" [=Setophaga] warblers are labeled spring. All in all, the paintings do not rise to the level of most modern guides, and all of them make a rough, tentative impression.
That same roughness is apparent in the images illustrating avian topography. The choice of a fluttering woodpecker--taken over from Northern South America--is an odd one given that there are only eleven records of any picid for all three islands combined; the drawing itself makes it hard to locate many of the feather areas identified, and some, such as the underwing coverts, are simply invisible. The use of the term "mesial" for the malar sensu Sibley is unusual, and it is impossible to distinguish the orbital ring from the eye ring on the passerine head.
One great advantage of this guide is its layout, where in "modern" style, text and plates face each other across the gutter. Unfortunately, the text is reproduced in a ridiculously tiny type--an unnecessarily tiny type, given the shocking abundance of blank space on many of the book's text pages. I'm not a book designer (readers, be grateful!), but I see no reason that the text could not have been enlarged or, even better, additional information used to fill all those creamy acres of nothing.
The texts are probably adequate to identify most of the birds included here. Outright errors are very few: I doubt that the extent of streaking is sufficient to distinguish winter individuals of the dark Plegadis ibis, and the account for Franklin's Gull is garbled. I'm very pleased to see attention paid in the texts and on the plates to geographic variation; most birds are identified to subspecies, and the authors point to a number of races that have not yet been detected but can be expected to occur on the islands. Some of the blank space on the text pages could have been devoted to more information on the identification of those still extralimital subspecies and of such species as the Western Reef Egret, Lesser and Greater Yellow-headed Vultures, and Yellow-billed Tern, all of which are mentioned as possibilities but none of which will be identifiable by the observer using just this guide.
The authors use a generally progressive taxonomy, relying "mainly" on the AOU's SACC. The old "Sandwich" terns are split, the bird included here known as Cabot's (Cayenne) Tern Thalasseus acuflavidus. At the same time, many of the parulids still bear their pre-2011 generic names, and Phalaropus lobatus is Red-necked in the main account and Northern in the discussion under Red Phalarope of similar species.
The back matter includes a chart showing the island-by-island distribution of all species recorded in the area. The bibliography is helpful, but for some reason cites the British edition of the Sibley field guide; Stoffers's 1956 Vegetation is listed without a publisher (it was Martinus Nijhoff),and von Berlepsch should be alphabetized under B, not V. It's a shame that the index does not include any of the local names listed in the text accounts.
Confident and reasonably experienced birders visiting these islands will, I think, find this conveniently sized guide a very useful memory jogger, along the lines of Princeton's illustrated checklists. Others may find the poor illustrations a significant barrier to identification; but even they will want to mark up their guide of choice using the lists provided here, reducing the overwhelming contents of larger works to just those birds found on these islands. Warm, warm islands....
It can be pretty flummoxing to get crippling looks at a bird that just doesn't look like anything in your field guides. While hawks can wipe out literalists searching for a perfect match (does any Red-tailed Hawk really look just like the ones illustrated?), young large gulls really run the gambit of intra-species diversity. Even when accounting for individual variation, some still feel like square pegs trying to fit into the round holes provided by the guides at hand. One such bird has been making the rounds in Broomfield and Boulder Counties in Colorado's northern Front Range this winter. On the one hand it shows traits of a 1st-winter Glaucous Gull- very large overall size, flattish head, beady little dark eyes, pink legs, crisply demarked wide black tip on an otherwise pink bill, and paler than most young Herring Gulls nearby for comparison. But the bird would certainly be pretty far out on the dark end of the Glaucous Gull spectrum and the wingtips are darker yet, not concolorous as would be expected on a Glock. The bird's wing projection is a bit long for Glaucous Gull as well, and perhaps the Frankengull appearance typical of that species is softened just a bit. Keeping in mind that large gulls are notoriously lax in their mate selection, hybridism should always be considered when all of the pieces don't quite add up. While general field guides have disappointingly few gull hybrid examples provided, Howell & Dunn's Gulls of the Americas has an extensive section of photos and discussions of about any mixed-up gull possibility to be found in the ABA area. Here we find a really solid match for the mystery gull- a hybrid 1st-winter Glaucous x Herring Gull, AKA Nelson's Gull. Thanks to Steve Mlodinow and Christian Nunes for putting me on this interesting beast!
1st-winter Nelson's Gull (Glaucous x Herring), Broomfield County, Colorado, 15 Jan 2012.
Steve N.G. Howell's new photographic guide covers all the procellariids, diomedeids, hydrobatids, and oceanitids recorded in (or off) the North American continent.
Yes, you read it right: oceanitids. The taxonomy Howell uses in Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels is progressive indeed, leaving the AOU's would-be canonical classification schemes in the dust. Not only do we find the southern storm-petrels assigned to their own family, Oceanitidae, but numerous novel genera and species are at least tentatively recognized. Howell treats in full 70 taxa, with comparative discussion of many more; in contrast, the AOU lists only 61 species for its area, which, unlike Howell's region of coverage, includes Hawaii. Following Howell (and Robb et al.'s marvelous Petrels Night and Day), we now have in North America, for example, three "Cory's" and six "Manx" shearwaters, two "Fea's" and two "great-winged" petrels, three "wandering" albatrosses, and three "band-rumped" and four "Leach's" storm-petrels. And before each of those numbers is to be understood a quiet "at least": many of the species, and even some of the genera, split here may well conceal other cryptic taxa deserving of species-level recognition. There may even be two "Northern" fulmars. Howell is scrupulous and admirably clear in explaining the nomenclatural "clusters" that have long made even talking about so many seabirds so difficult.
Not to mention identifying them. But even storm-petrel identification, rightly described here as "one of the most challenging frontiers in modern birding," will be made less frustrating in most cases by the wealth of carefully chosen and beautifully well presented information in this book. The (sub)species accounts are clear and thorough, with full treatment of taxonomy, status and distribution, and similar taxa; behavior, especially flight habit, is given considerable space, and Howell's descriptions here are as clear as they are evocative. Each taxon treated is illustrated with an impressive number of often dazzlingly good photos--and, perhaps even more importantly, often with some poorer images of birds at a distance, in fog, or nearly lost in a swarm of similar congeners. The captions are marvels of concise eloquence, pointing out important characters and comparing similar species, sometimes even in the same photo.
Particularly given the abundance of information and the very large number of photographs here, the book is very well produced. I might prefer to have seen a single type face throughout, rather than a different, larger and unattractive font for the introductory material. Typos are very few and mostly insignificant. The name of the island Trinidade is inconsistently spelled, and the caption to photo 7.11 reverses the identity of the background birds. The Christmas Shearwater is Puffinus nativitatis (not -us), and the black margin to the underwing of the Hawaiian Petrel is thin (not, as claimed in Fig. 120, "thick"). The specific epithet of the Black-capped Petrel, hasitata, is probably a misspelling not of haesitata but of hastata, meaning blade-shaped, in reference to the wings. Howell's writing is as pleasingly vivid as it is informative; still, it's unusual to see the phrase "brain fart" in print, and I'm skeptical as to whether "emotional castration" is truly behind the occasional abbreviation of the name of the Light-mantled Sooty Albatross.
As one might expect from the author of the molt volume in the Peterson Reference Guide series, the plumages of seabirds are discussed with special thoroughness here. Howell gives us eight well-illustrated pages on the topic in his introduction, then provides dates--at least tentative dates--and details in each species account. It turns out that it is precisely that molt information that permits the distinction in the field between many pairs and trios of similar species; many of Howell's photos show this very well, making this an essential tool to help readers get their eye in for their next pelagic trip. But even if you're not going down to the sea in boats, Petrels, in its sophistication of approach and exemplary detail, may well be the most useful book you read this year.
It's a chunk of a book, with print large enough even for my eyes; those looking for a field-worthy version will want to stick with the first, neatly pocket-sized edition, but it's so cheap that there's no reason not to buy both!
James Currie, host of Nikon's Birding Adventures TV, was on the scene in Colombia when remarkable news came through that a mystery hummingbird was feeding at a private nature reserve three hours north of Bogotá. At first, the species was thought to be the Bogotá Sunangel (Heliangelus zusii), a lost relic known to science only from a single specimen purchased by a collector in 1909. Needless to say, this caused quite a stir both on the ground and on the Internet as the news caught fire. Is the species indeed a Bogotá Sunangel? A hybrid? A new species or genus? Time will tell.
In our interview, and as described in this video clip below, James relates the unfolding mystery of the sighting, filming, and eventual capture of this hummingbird and proffers his impressions of the bird's ID.
James, you just returned from filming a Nikon's Birding Adventures TV (BATV) series in Colombia - which by all measures has some of the most incredible biodiversity on the planet. What regions did you visit? How would you rate your birding experience?
Yes, ProExport Colombia sent me down there to film three episodes of BATV on the birds of Colombia. We were escorted through several parts of the country by Daniel Uribe and Sergio Ocampo of Birding Tours Colombia, a local tour operator that excels in birding trips to Colombia.
We visited Los Nevados in quest of Bearded Helmetcrest and other goodies, then Río Blanco, Montezuma and Otun Quimbaya in search of Cauca Guan and rare tanagers and lastly, to the Cali region in quest of Grayish Piculet. This was my first time birding in Colombia – the birding here is unaparalleled. I think that this is what birding in heaven must be like!
While you were there a group of Colombian ornithologists discovered a hummingbird that caused quite a stir. Some initially suspected it could be the Bogotá Sunangel-a hummingbird so rare that it has actually never been documented alive; it is only known from a single specimen that was purchased by a collector in 1909. What was your role in this find?
On our final day, we received notice that a suspected Bogotá Sunangel had been rediscovered 3 hours north of Bogotá. The hummingbird was reportedly feeding in fuchsia flowers at a private nature reserve (Rogitama Nature Preserve). Though filming had wrapped up, I extended my stay by three extra days in the hopes of documenting this find – whatever it would be.
Can you describe what the energy was like at the scene? What other professionals were involved?
With ProExport's support, Daniel Uribe and his brother escorted me to the reserve. The night before, I was awake all night wondering which way it would go: would I be lucky enough to find, and film, a major ornithological discovery or would the bird turn out to be something quite ordinary? I was so amped when we got there and found the bird really quickly. Immediately it was apparent that this bird was something very different.
Colombian ornithologists involved in the identification include Roberto Chávarro (ornithologist, owner Rogitama Nature Reserve), Oswaldo Cortes (Universidad Nacional), Diego Calderon (Colombia Birding), Laura Agudelo, (Colombia Birding and Sociedad Antioqueña de Ornitologia), Gary Stiles (Docente Universidad Nacional), Pablo Rodriguez (Docente Universidad UPTC), Andrea Fonseca (Biologa UPTC), and Jurgen Beckerns (Trogon Trips). Major props also go to the entire Chávarro family for creating this nature reserve and sharing it with visitors.
Did you obtain footage of this bird? How many did you see?
Yes, see the YouTube clip above! My camerman Jeff had gone home, so all I had was a hand-held video camera but we managed to get pretty good shots of the bird in good light.
It was difficult to ascertain exactly how many birds are there. I suspect that there are at least two but as you know, hummingbirds are lightning fast so we cannot be sure. The bird looks different under varying light and distance conditions, which further complicates the ID process.
Can you describe its appearance and behavior? What was your initial impression of the bird’s ID?
In some light conditions the bird looks almost all black. In other conditions it can appear pale grayish/green on the underside. (Unless, of course, there is more than one bird!)
The bird has a distinctive pale whitish vent/undertail coverts, a short straight bill, white spot behind the eye, a long, dark purple tail and a bluish-green gorget and green shield. It was clear that bird was highly unusual and it didn’t fit the description of other sylphs found anywhere in Colombia.
Although my opinion leans towards something sylphish or closely related to a sylph, DNA analysis will be key to revealing its identity.
Ultimately, the hummingbird was captured by professor Gary Stiles who marked it, measured it, and captured two feathers for DNA analysis before releasing it back to the wild. What is the current thought on the bird’s ID?
Many of us spent hours and hours looking at it and it certainly appears to be something out of the ordinary—we just don’t know what yet. It may either be a new genus of sylph, a new species, a hybrid, or a color variation of Long-tailed Sylph. It could even turn out to be a Bogotá Sunangel, although I doubt it.
The difficulty here is that only one specimen of Bogotá Sunangel exists. Although it does not appear to be the sunangel from the official description in The Auk (read here), we have no idea how much variation there was with this species. So, in other words, we can only hypothesize at this stage.
DNA analysis is underway and we’re anxiously waiting on the results.
Where can birders stay posted about developments on this mystery bird?
I would wait for an official statement from the Colombian team or from the owner of the reserve, Roberto Chávarro. Once we hear anything we will post developments on our Facebook page.
We look forward to you occasionally sharing Nikon's Birding Adventures footage from around the world here on the ABA blog. Will you be sharing any more of this hummingbird footage here or on your show?
We have so much footage of Colombia that it might be tough to include this in the upcoming shows but I think we will include a little of it. Depends if my camera work makes the cut. Without my trusty camerman, I was left to my own devices for better or for worse. I learned a lot but my footage is not going to win any film awards anytime soon!
Check out some of this video footage, below:
Thanks for the update, James! Let us know what you find out.
Nikon's Birding Adventures TV features birding hotspots around the globe. It can be viewed Mondays at 10:00 am EST and Tuesdays at 2:30 pm EST on Versus/NBC Sports, Inc. from January through June. Stay updated with James' birding travels on Facebook or subscribe to the BATV YouTube channel.
Few are the bird books that go through six editions in their authors' lifetimes, and fewer still those every edition of which takes another considerable step up in accuracy, completeness, and usefulness. Precious few indeed.
But here's one.
I remember well my first sight of the then-new National Geographic Field Guide, twenty-eight years ago (!), and I couldn't wait to get my own copy. I've leapt on each new edition ever since, and nearly three decades of living with the book has only affirmed my conviction that this is by far the best book of any for learning the birds of the United States and Canada. And this new, sixth edition is by far the best of this splendid guide's incarnations so far.
There's no need here to rehearse in detail the NatGeo's many advantages over even its most worthy competitors. Some of those advantages--the rich text, the emphasis on variation, the comprehensiveness even at the outermost edges of the area covered--have been present ab ovo, but they have been strengthened, and new strengths added, by the increasingly unified authorial leadership provided by Jon Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer (with Paul Lehman supplying his usual excellent maps).
The editorial history of the book is as fascinating as it has been complicated: starting in the late 1970s as a true team effort forged in sad circumstances, this guide has with each passing edition become more and more the child of one of North America's very finest field ornithologists, and each new edition should be read as approaching ever more closely to Jon Dunn's ideal conception of the field guide.
Mirroring Dunn's interests and expertise, this sixth edition adds considerably to the status and distribution information available in earlier versions of the guide. We are given population numbers for many rare taxa, and the accounts for many casual and accidental species include precise dates and locations, a great boon for the watchful seeker of repeat occurrences; quite detailed historical information is often provided for species whose ranges or abundance have changed notably. Several species still relegated to an appendix in the fifth edition have been moved into the main text, and some rarities once crowded inconspicuously among the "normal" birds of the area have now been given their own plates and more extensive texts.
Even a few species not yet recorded in North America north of Mexico are treated: the Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher account urges careful separation of apparent vagrants from the Streaked Flycatcher, and ambitious East Coast birders are furnished with an illustration and brief identification material for the Common Scoter that is certainly lurking out there in the flocks of the (newly re-split) Black Scoter.
A trademark of this guide since its first edition, geographic variation is accorded especially full and sophisticated treatment here. Some such information appears on the plates; the seventeen figures of the Horned Lark, for example, are larger than in the immediately preceding edition and more amply annotated (one of the very few layout errors in the book finds the label alpestris for one of the flying birds attached to a perched strigata). For other taxa, such as the Common/Holarctic/Californian/Chihuahan Ravens, significant portions of the text are devoted to introducing the complications of their geographic relationships. And for nearly 100 species that are especially complex, the maps--either those accompanying the species accounts or additional, larger maps in an appendix--indicate the breeding range and often the migration routes and wintering grounds of field-identifiable subspecies and subspecies groups. Study a few of these maps carefully, and I think you'll agree with me that no self-respecting field guide of the future will fail to imitate them. Just think what an e-guide could do with this idea, adding layer upon layer to a species' base map....
Unmatchable in so many ways, the NatGeo guide, even in this newest edition, still reveals weaknesses in its paintings. Thanks to the involvement of Jonathan Alderfer in the last couple of editions, though, the less satisfying illustrations--the troublesome legacy of the book's origins as a committee project--are slowly but surely being replaced with far better images. Something like 300 new figures were painted for this edition, by Alderfer, Killian Mullarney, David Quinn, John Schmitt, and Thomas Schultz; a quick leaf through the art credits finds many of my favorite plates and images attributed to these artists.
More noticeable, and perhaps more important, than the new figures is the new design of very many of the plates, permitting the enlargement of many birds that in previous editions were tucked into corners and margins. At the same time, the redesign has left space for sometimes extensive annotation directly on the plates themselves, an innovation with an obvious and estimable forebear.
The sixth edition of the National Geographic Field Guide is, simply put, the one book every North American birder needs to have on the shelf. Beginners will find it attractive, easy to use, and portable; intermediate and advanced birders will refer to it again and again with profit--and with surprise at how much it can teach even the most experienced among us.
As birders, our goal is to find and identify birds. That is what we do when we are out in the field, driving, doing yard work, or just glancing out the window. Our overriding urge is to see and then identify birds. Fortunately for us, birds are everywhere. No matter where you go in the ABA area (and, I dare say, the entire world), there are birds to be seen. And as I mentioned in my previous post, we should always be prepared for the unexpected, as you never know what you will find, even in unlikely places. All of this put together means that seeing birds is relatively easy.
The second part, identifying, can be more difficult. We try to identify every bird we see. Sure, if a bird is too far away or if the conditions are poor (low light, back light, fog, etc.), we may admit that we aren't sure what the bird was, aside from "It was a duck" or "Definitely a small passerine". This is of course the thing to do, because we just don't have enough information to completely identify what we've seen. What I want to discuss is when we have an abundance of information: when the bird is a few feet away in good light, providing excellent views. This is when the urge to identify, to name every individual possible, can get us into trouble.
Imagine the scenario that you are birding with friends. A small bird sits up on a close perch, and you are the closest to it. You get a good long look through your binoculars, and then it disappears back into the brush. You are very confused by the bird, and aren't sure of any specific ID (and in fact you aren't quite sure what family it was in). Your friends weren't as close and didn't have the view that you did; they ask you, "What was that?" This is when it is tempting to try to make the call; we want to identify birds, and we want to be good at it. We want to know what things are, and we don't want to seem like incompetent birders. We want to say without a doubt "Female Indigo Bunting". This can be an especially powerful urge if we've spent time around birders that are better than we are, and we want to show that same ability. The last thing we want to admit is that "I don't know".
"I don't know" is one of the few identifications we can ever be completely confident about. If you say you aren't sure, you are being completely honest and are completely right. When we identify birds to species, there is always that lingering possibility that we are wrong (hybridization, mutation, environmental contamination, etc., can all cause an obvious identity to be subtly or completely incorrect). Another benefit is that saying we aren't sure shows other birders that it is okay to be uncertain, that it is okay to question what we saw. These sorts of uncertainties can lead to good outcomes. In the scenario above, imagine you call out "Indigo Bunting". Your friends may keep walking, accepting your ID. You've just lost an opportunity to perhaps learn from your birding group's collective knowledge. If you say you aren't quite sure, perhaps someone more familiar with that age/plumage/subspecies will have some helpful insights into how to identify that individual, things you can use for the future.
Alternately, perhaps you say I don't know, and your birding group takes a closer look and finds a Lazuli Bunting, a rare bird in your area. Now you've learned something and helped find a rarity. The final, and least desirable, scenario is that you make the Indigo Bunting ID, despite your uncertainties; one of your birding friends happens to come across the same bird and makes the correct ID. Now you're embarrassed about the misidentification, and perhaps miss out on a good learning opportunity because of it.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to identify every single bird every time. Admitting that you aren't sure is always okay. It doesn't mean you are a bad birder, just that you are honest. Birders at every level make mistakes. Saying "I don't know" is never a mistake.
I'm a great admirer of ambition, whatever its object. And this attractive book is nothing if not ambitious: the Stokeses have set out explicitly "to produce the most useful [italics in original] guide to identifying the birds of North America ever published; to cover more species than almost all other guides; to create the most complete photographic record of these species' plumages and subspecies variations that has ever existed in one guide; to make sure the identification clues were both thorough and up-to-date [sic; no hyphens, please]; to clearly and quantitatively describe each species' shape as a key element of field identification; and to summarize all subspecies ranges and main distinguishing characteristics."
Whew. That's a lot of ambition. I snorted ever so slightly when I read that list of goals, then raised my eyebrows higher and higher in happy surprise as I read the book: not every one of the authors' ambitions is perfectly realized, but they have indeed succeeded in producing a very fine book, easily among the best photographic guides to North American birds ever, and one that--in the reviewer's cliche--every birder with more than a casual interest in identification, distribution, and geographic variation will consult with profit.
This new guide is illustrated with some 3,400 photographs, most of them of very high quality and most (would it were more) reasonably large on the page. Many larger birds are shown in flight, but relatively few of the nightjars, woodpeckers, or passerines are accorded the same treatment; it seems to me that flight images of all the birds in a guide have been de rigueur since the publication of the big Sibley ten years ago, and an entire generation of photographers (witness the Crossley guide) has been busy creating startlingly accurate flight images of North American birds. Flight photos of meadowlark tails or goldfinch wings can be worth some dozens of words.
The flight photos that are included here are generally well chosen, but even more careful selection would have made some of them more useful to the birder. It seems to me very important that field guide images obey the principle of the minimal pair, reducing variation to just those differences that are significant to identification. It should not have been difficult to find shots of the upperwing of a Ring-necked Duck, for example, to compare with the beautiful facing-page image of Tufted, while it would have been helpful to replace one of the two photos of the upper surface of flying Lesser Scaup with one of the underwing--as in the facing image of Greater Scaup. Similar miscalculations are frequent, as a quick leafing through will demonstrate.
Twenty years ago, that observation would have introduced a tirade on the general inferiority of photographs to paintings in an identification guide. Nowadays, though, there is such an abundance of good--even great--photographic material available to field guide designers that scrupulous selection and a little computer manipulation can produce comparisons as precise as any set of paintings.
There are also photographs available out there that illustrate nearly every age- and sex-related plumage of nearly every species. This guide does not consistently take advantage of that fact; there are no juvenile Myiarchus flycatchers, only one juvenile wood warbler, and no female Aztec Thrushes (that last on a page with lots of white space). These and other omissions aren't likely to bother most readers most of the time, but the absence of photos of any but adult Melospiza is not calculated to help beginners avoid finding so-called Lincoln's Sparrows at strange places and strange times.
One of this guide's great and welcome innovations (which I understand it will share with the forthcoming 6th edition of the National Geographic Guide) is the attention it pays to geographic variation. Thus, we have, for example, two dozen Red-tailed Hawk photographs, seven Fox Sparrows, 10 Common and six Hoary Redpolls, and so on. The subspecies taxonomy here--including group names--is based on that in Pyle's Identification Guide. To their credit, the authors venture a subspecific identification only of birds photographed on the breeding grounds; that principle prevents the so-easy misidentification of migrants and wintering birds, but it also points to one of the lingering weaknesses of photographic guides: laudable caution prevents the labeling of the obvious March saltonis Song Sparrow here, while a painter need obey no such scruples so long as she or he has access to a good museum.
Perhaps the most interesting goal the authors have set themselves is to quantify and verbalize the shape "impressions" that most birders use to identify most birds; the authors believe that "every qualitative description of bird shape can be analyzed and more carefully conveyed to others through a careful, more quantitative description." Giving us words and ways to talk about shape and structure is a great thing, and where the effort is carried out here, it is largely successful; rather than saying simply that the bill of Thick-billed Murre is shorter and deeper than that of Common Murre, the text tells us that the feathering on the former's culmen is half as long as the gape and the exposed culmen three quarters the length of the lore. Such impressive precision isn't without risk: there are cases where the photos, carefully measured, appear to put the lie to the descriptions. More disappointing is the book's failure to be consistently "quantitative." The bean-geese and the white-cheeked Branta, for example, are accorded the full numerical treatment, but the accounts for Ross's and Snow Geese simply resort to descriptions such as "moderately long-necked" or "short stubby bill." I would really like to have seen the "quantification" experiment carried through the entire book.
There are astonishingly few identification errors in the more than 3,000 photos here, eloquent testimony to the authors' skill and the editor's care. A first flicker through the pages turns up only two mislabeled Mallards; the drake diazi is clearly of mixed Mexican x Northern heritage, while the henlooks like a perfectly normal Northern Mallard to me. Even if more leisurely use of the guide finds other slips, it remains eminently reliable.
So where do we stand? With 854 species, the Stokeses' new guide's coverage compares very favorably to many other guides (but does not approach the comprehensiveness of the latest editions of NatGeo). As a photographic resource for geographic variation, it is without equal, and the project of "quantification" is an interesting way to inspire birders to look more critically and more carefully at their birds. This new guide is not the most useful North American guide ever published, but it is highly recommended as one that every birder can use with pleasure and with profit.
It's hard not to like an author who is so clear about his intentions: in the eleven sentences of Introduction he gives his new Princeton Illustrated Checklist, Norman Arlott warns the reader that this is not "the ultimate field guide," but rather "a helpful nudge" meant to "add to the pleasure of anticipation or memory," modeled on the sort of notes a birder might make before visiting a new region.
Such a work might--might--make sense from the point of view of an English-speaking European about to start out on her first tentative journey to the New World. To put it bluntly, though, this book makes no sense whatsoever when it's turned loose on an audience of "native" birders. The American publisher has made no effort to alter and adapt the content of the original British edition to the needs and expectations of readers over here; the completely rudderless taxonomy and nomenclature make that clear enough, but William Street hasn't even bothered to touch up the (slapdash) bibliography to include i t s o w n e d i t i o n s of many of the UK titles included.
Not to mention the needless breaking of the slender texts into sections, the poor binding that loses the range maps in the gutter, the absence of flight illustrations for the vast majority of species, the grotesquely odd shapes of many of the birds that are shown in flight, the failure to print all the images on a plate to scale, the inadequate proofreading and copy editing, the bizarre colors of the blue corvids, the substitution of paintings of Spotless Starling for European Starling, and the dozens of other errors that leap out on even the most cursory reading.
The book does have pretty pictures (though not unfailingly accurate pictures) and an index. But that's not enough to recommend this title to any birder--particularly, heaven help us, not to beginners or casual birders, who will come away helplessly confused, and probably wondering how to pronounce "Brünnich's Guillemot."
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