The Best in the Field
by Howard Youth
As they have for millennia, hawks--sharp-shinned, Cooper's, red-tailed, and others--effortlessly cruise south on warm air currents that waft up Pennsylvania's Blue Ridge Mountains. Spectators have gathered on this blustery day, anticipating the birds' annual fall passage. Stiff winds push the hawks low over the boulder-strewn ridge. The waiting group of watchers rises. They set their sights. A moment later, gunfire greets the arriving hawks, and bone-crushing shot sends many plummeting to earth. The year is 1924, and Hawk Mountain--a narrow passageway between wide ridges--has again proven to be a shooter's paradise.
Today, 75 years later, throngs of birders, armed with binoculars and books, perch on Hawk Mountain's boulders, enjoying the hawks' safe passage. Wildlife watching, especially birding, has become one of the nation's most popular pastimes, the offshoot of a vast increase in environmental awareness since the hawk-shooting days before 1934, when Hawk Mountain was transformed from shooting gallery to wildlife sanctuary. That same year, the first modern field guide, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, rolled off the presses at Houghton Mifflin.
During these last days of the millennium, biodiversity and conservation are hot topics, so it's not surprising that new field guides, books that helped fuel the environmental movement, keep appearing. Publishers love them. Readers demand more and more of them. And standards--for the accuracy and depth of information and quality of art and printing--are higher than ever. Field guides have become essential gear for curious backyard naturalists, widely traveled ecotourists, and conservationists trying to inventory and save rainforests and other habitats. Their value is now recognized by governments and by institutions such as the World Bank, and a growing number are funded by these entities. The beauty of the field guide, its blend of art and easily read information, perhaps appeals to us just as leafing through catalogs does. You don't sit down and read a field guide cover to cover. You browse it to find something you would like to see or identify. The reward of a successful identification spurs you to make more discoveries. And so it goes. But unlike catalogs, field guides leave their readers with a growing knowledge of the diversity of flora or fauna, providing a sense of place while kindling a concern for conservation. But it wasn't always that way.
Birth of the Modern Field Guide
"The object of this book is to encourage the study of birds by rendering it a pleasant and easy task," wrote Austin C. Apgar in 1898. In the preface to Apgar's Birds of the United States, the author boasted about the simplicity of his identification keys, writing that "even a child can follow them with ease, and discover by their aid the names of birds both in the hand and in the bush." Apgar's book, and many like it from the early part of the 20th century, were field guides, compact books that succinctly covered an area of natural history. But they were not very easy to use, at least not to identify similar living individuals of separate species. For one thing, identification keys, as any botany or entomology student knows, are not exactly child's play, and take time to master.
In Apgar's guide, each bird group had its own key that focused on attributes the bird lover could examine on recently killed birds or museum specimens. At the book's end, another key, designed to "emphasize such features as can be seen with the naked eye or through an opera glass," compared birds' relative sizes, plotting identification clues from there. A chapter on skinning, stuffing, and mounting birds and collecting their nests immediately followed. The author recommended killing birds with "dust or No. 12 shot" because "either of these makes such small holes in the skin that there is rarely enough bleeding to injure the plumage."
Some 36 years later, Peterson's bird guide revolutionized field identification by assembling the identification tips he and his New York birding buddies collected and pairing them with simple paintings and black arrows. "There was a revolution in birding going on in the Bronx in the early 1930s, as birders shifted from the shotgun school of birding to the field glass," wrote Peterson in 1996, in his last column for Bird Watcher's Digest, which was published shortly before his death at age 87. "I, being the artist of the group (the Bronx County Bird Club), pulled our identification system all together with my field guide. I added the arrows still in use, developing what became known as the 'Peterson System,' since extended to other branches of natural history."
Peterson's book was not the first field guide. But it revolutionized field identification. Few books have recruited more conservationists. Over the years, Peterson's first book was revised three times, founded a series of guides dealing with other natural history topics, and inspired spirited competition from other field guide authors and artists.
Butterflies: The Next Wave
Something is amiss on the May 1 Maryland Ornithological Society (MOS) field trip. Instead of looking to the skies or the treetops, a dozen birders stand in a ragged horseshoe, pointing their binoculars and spotting scopes down at the grass in front of their feet. "Beautiful!" "Look at those bright orange wing patches!" "Wow, that really is something. Never seen one like that before." These exclamations remark not on a bird, but on an insect. Identification is clinched--"It looks like an American copper!"--when Rick Sussman, the trip leader, reaches for his field guide--a butterfly field guide.
Many recent converts to butterfly watching, including the MOS birders, trace their new love of winged insects to a 1993 book called Butterflies through Binoculars. Unlike many other field guides, which use paintings drawn to scale, this book employs carefully sized photographs of living butterflies as identification tools. In the new, expanded edition, Butterflies through Binoculars: The East, the photos have been rotated and sized via computer to share the same orientation, for easier comparison. Also, maps now face the butterfly photos, so identification clues and range can be considered simultaneously in the field.
"Butterflying will be as popular as birding in 20 years," predicts Jeffrey Glassberg, the book's author. "It's got everything birding has going for it, plus a lot more. Butterflies don't have songs, but they allow you to interact in a more confiding way. You're amidst them in the field. Often they climb up on your finger. In addition, they're far easier to photograph--anyone can do it--and there's a close gardening connection." Glassberg, a molecular biologist, lawyer, and butterfly authority, considers his guide the first real butterfly field guide. Sure, there have been other books, including a few in the Peterson series. But Glassberg maintains that these books focused on dead butterflies. They were painted from specimens, and proved most useful to people who netted butterflies. "My book catalyzed a lot of people in the Northeast. This was the first time people began to see butterflies--and other insects--as wildlife. That wasn't true a couple of years ago." Glassberg says he did not write his field guides for money. "The whole purpose is to get people involved in butterflies so there's a constituency to try to save them." He is president of the North American Butterfly Association (NABA), a nonprofit conservation organization with 3,500 members and 25 chapters across North America.
"I struggled and struggled with butterflies until that book came out," says Julie Zickefoose, an Ohio-based naturalist, birder, writer, and illustrator. "For eight or nine years, I felt a duty to learn butterflies. Then two things happened: I moved to our farm in Ohio and I got Glassberg. Now, 65 species later, I will take off for a butterfly like I won't for a bird."
Conquering the Backyard Jungle
While birds have legions of followers, and butterflies a growing constituency, other wildlife groups also have been getting better field guide treatment in recent years. As information, and its availability, increases, naturalists continue to expand their horizons. Which is not to say they are just traveling farther and farther. They are also looking closer and closer.
Many backyard botanists reach for Lauren Brown's books. The Connecticut botanist, author, and illustrator is among the minority of field guide creators who, like the late Peterson, both wrote and illustrated their ground-breaking works. Brown wrote and illustrated Grasses: An Identification Guide and Wildflowers and Winter Weeds, a recently re-issued book originally published in 1976 as Weeds in Winter.
Bringing botany home to lay people is a special challenge, says Brown, who adds that writing a plant field guide is far more difficult than a bird book. For one thing, there are usually far more plant species than birds in an area, and identification is often tougher. "I tell students, 'Read the text, read the text! Don't just look at the pictures.' There's so much variability within species." When it came to text writing, Brown, sharing the concerns of other field guide authors, says she had to be very careful. "To me, one of the most important things was to use simple English. A lot of technical jargon is unnecessary." Brevity was also important, so not all species could be covered. "It makes it easy if you have fewer species. With fewer choices, you're more likely to find the right answer. But you're taking a gamble: If you narrow it down to the most common species, there's the possibility that someone will find something unusual." Regarding illustrations, Brown says pen-and-ink drawings serve her well, since most of her plant subjects are the same color. Some of her drawings, reprinted from her grasses book, adorn the Zoo's new American Prairie Exhibit.
In addition to plants, invertebrates puzzle many ardent naturalists. In fact, cataloging all the invertebrates living around your house would be a daunting task. But that's exactly what National Zoo Curator of Mammals John Seidensticker wants to do at his home in Washington, D.C., with a little help from modern technology. "My objective is to try to know everything that lives in my yard. That's a very hard thing to do. I've got all kinds of bug guides. I'm not even close to mastering it all," he says. To help him with his inventory, Seidensticker plans to use a biodiversity database manager called Biota, which was developed in Costa Rica to quantify inventories of rainforest insects and arachnids. By entering the characteristics of an insect or spider, the program will help Seidensticker narrow the identification possibilities. "This takes the field guide to another level," he says.
New Frontiers
With more than 30 years of experience as an entomologist and ornithologist, and years of worldwide travel in search of rare insects and birds, Donald Messersmith often depends upon field guides to help him determine what he's seeing. His mother gave him his first bird field guide in the 1940s. Today, his library of about 3,000 books is dominated by bird-related titles covering most parts of the world. "Overall, with some exceptions, as I've traveled around the world, there have been better and better bird field guides," he says. "Today, there aren't many areas that are not covered in one way or another."
Messersmith's travels included pioneering trips to China, when few foreign tourists could visit the country. In those days, you couldn't pack light if you wanted to identify birds. "On my first trips to China in 1982, 1983, and 1984, I brought along field guides to the birds of Russia, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Even with all these books, there was still a gap in the middle of China." That changed with the 1984 publication of The Birds of China by Meyer de Schauensee, which compiled all of China's bird species, illustrated many of them, and described the birds and their distribution. Recently, China's leading ornithologist, professor Hsu Weishu, and his Taiwanese colleagues, published a detailed field guide in Chinese.
On Messersmith's first trips, "they [the Chinese] bent over backwards to help me get to remote places." Soon, eased travel restrictions helped China's tourism industry blossom, and more birders followed. Messersmith, in turn, grew very interested in China's conservation programs. In 1983, he became the first World Bank environmental consultant to China, helping designate wetland areas along the Yellow River Basin that needed protection. In 1987, he taught ornithology in Nanjing, and he helped found the first nongovernmental birding group in China. Messersmith believes ecotourism, fueled in good part by freer access and good field guides, contributed to a conservation consciousness that helped China expand its nature reserve system from one site in 1959 to more than 300 today.
Ecotourists are not the only beneficiaries of pioneering field guides. Scientists often rely on these books to help them with their work. Alwyn H. Gentry, a pre-eminent botanist who died in an Ecuadorian plane crash in 1993, co-authored, with Adrian Forsyth, a hefty manual called A Field Guide to the Families and Genera of Woody Plants of Northwest South America. "There had been nothing at all on how to do genera of plants down there. His book has become the bible. Most botanists do flower or pressed specimens, but Gentry identified infertile plants in the field. He was a genius at that," says Louise Emmons, a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Emmons wrote another pioneering book inspired by her years of field work in South America. Neotropical Rainforest Mammals, now in its second edition, filled a gaping void. "There was absolutely nothing available, in any language--not even a list of monkeys--for anywhere I worked," remembers Emmons. She spent three and a half years assembling a field guide that included information on South American rainforest mammals, from bats to tapirs, including their local names, distribution, behavior, status, and geographic variation. "I'm a field biologist and not an activist," says Emmons, explaining why she toiled over her book. "I consider my three and a half years my gift or contribution to the conservation of South American mammals."
Emmons says she had South Americans and scientists in mind when she wrote Neotropical Rainforest Mammals. She's pleased with the results. Even though the book is not yet widely available in South America (the first Spanish edition is due out in Bolivia this summer), Emmons says, "A lot of copies are down there among students who work in the field." These books worked their way south thanks to generous North American contributors, Emmons among them. "I've probably given away more copies than my royalties would add up to," she says. Emmons feels that writing field guides doesn't necessarily elevate your status within the scientific community. "You don't get any points from scientific colleagues for writing them because the information usually isn't credited. But that's not why I wrote it, although it did in the end become fairly successful in the scientific community, much to my surprise."
A Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica by F. Gary Stiles and Alexander F. Skutch, the dean of Latin American bird behavior study, has been a similar success. Seventeen years in the making, this guide to Costa Rica's 830 bird species was intended to help the ecotourists flocking to the Central America country sort through the birds they see, as well as to encourage Costa Ricans to take an interest in their diverse avifauna. Jim Lewis, a tour leader who lives in Costa Rica, thinks the book, which is now available in a Spanish edition, has met its second goal more than its first. "The number of students, guides, drivers of tour groups, and park personnel who have the book in hand is amazing," he says. He attributes the falling number of tourists who buy the book to a change in demographics. When the book was first printed in 1989, most foreign visitors to Costa Rica were ecotourists, either amateur naturalists or whitewater rafters. However, the country's new resorts and growing reputation as an exotic vacation spot have brought more generalized tourists.
As in Costa Rica, local language field guides play an increasingly important role in growing environmental movements in other parts of the world. Tony Whitten, a World Bank biodiversity specialist who focuses on Asia, says the World Bank's interest in helping fund field guides has grown in recent years. "At the start of this year, I was given $400,000 by a World Bank-Netherlands Partnership Fund to produce local-language field guides in East Asia. News of the opportunity spread far and wide, and we ended up with a staggering 87 proposals of which we could support only 16...." Whitten and his colleagues hope to find donors to fund increased print runs and the additional proposals. He believes these books have a major impact on the new generation of conservationists. "A friend in Indonesia once did a survey and found that 40 percent of the young professionals working in local or international conservation NGOs [non-governmental organizations] there could trace their commitment to the 'cause' to their use of the first Indonesian field guide--to the birds of Java and Bali published in 1986."
Meanwhile, a field guide entitled Wildlife of the Maltese Islands has helped nurture another growing group of conservationists. While the carnage of annual Hawk Mountain shoots is a memory in the U.S., similar sights prevail in Malta each spring and fall. Shooters in this tiny Mediterranean island nation annually kill up to one million birds, from swallows to hawks, during the migration seasons, when large numbers move between nesting grounds in Europe and wintering areas in Africa. What's more, poor enforcement of wildlife laws, coupled with resorts and housing developments chewing into remaining habitats, threaten not only birds but the island's other fauna and its flora. Although Malta has a long way to go to protect its wildlife, students and conservation groups, thanks in part to the government-funded field guide, are gaining a stronger voice. "The book has put nature conservation on the local agenda, especially with regards to education," says Joe Sultana, one of the book's editors. Wildlife of the Maltese Islands was the first book to cover the islands' wildlife, from algae to mammals. A team of authors and illustrators pooled their expertise to include 985 species. First published in Maltese by the government's Environment Protection Department in 1995, the book's English version, funded by a private publisher, followed in 1996.
From Malta to a mountaintop in Pennsylvania, field guides help people celebrate their ties to nature. As the world grows ever smaller, and conservation concerns grow larger, these small, powerful books will continue to help people become better advocates for the environment, one page at a time.
(ZooGoer 28(4) 1999. Copyright 1999 Howard Youth. All rights reserved.)
