It’s worthwhile to begin by considering exactly what a field guide IS in the bird world, and the best way to do that is to pause and look back -- back to 1934, when Roger Tory Peterson’s first field guide was published.

That wasn’t the first bird book. A lot of other books were available. There were already scholarly references filled with details on plumage differences among species and among subspecies. There were already books with beautiful paintings of birds -- far more elaborate than the simple diagrams in Peterson’s book. The genius of the Peterson field guide was that it was so SIMPLE. Masses of detail were boiled down to their essentials, to key points that a first-time birder could grasp immediately. The book was not intended to please the experts nor to impress the professionals; rather, it was intended to make bird identification possible for absolutely everyone. Compact, well-organized, it was easy to carry and easy to use. It made no pretense of being a thorough reference work -- that wasn’t the point. It was a field guide.

That concept of a field guide was standard for almost half a century. Even Peterson’s competitors (such as the Golden Guide, by Chandler Robbins and others, published in the 1960s) hewed to the principle of keeping it compact and simple. But since the early 1980s, we’ve seen a gradual shift. Some books published recently under the guise of field guides have tried to cram in as much detail as the technical ornithological tomes of the past.

Once I saw what was happening to the state of field guides, I was determined to get back to basics, back to the original intent of a field guide: clear, compact, conveniently organized, easy to carry and easy for anyone to use.

Among the thousands of decisions involved in producing a field guide, one decision has to come first. It’s not about how the book will be illustrated, nor about who will publish it. Those are important questions, but not the most important. The very first question is this: who is the book for?

I mentioned this concept to some of my birding pals, and they looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles. “Who is it FOR? A field guide? Come on. It’s for birders, who else?”

That might seem like the obvious answer, but I believe that it’s way off. There are many millions of people on this continent who like birds, and who may want to know what kinds they’re seeing. There are only a few tens of thousands who think of themselves as birders. The person who can recognize a hundred species is already far ahead of the average field guide user.

Within the last few decades, our collective knowledge of field identification has grown by vast amounts. There are now whole books on the identification of single families of birds. This is a great thing for the experienced birder; but it has widened the gap between beginners and experts. It is simply impossible today for a field guide to be “ideal for beginners and experts alike,” even though that phrase still pops up in advertising. So do you aim a field guide at the person who is ready to take on the difficult challenges of Empidonax flycatchers and second-year gulls? Do you aim it at the other 99.9 per cent? Do you try to compromise?

In my case, I kept a couple of imaginary users in mind throughout the process of working on my field guide. These imaginary characters are active, curious people who have decided to try birding... and they want a book they can use to learn the birds on their own. Are they intelligent? Sure. But they don’t know a House Finch when they see one, or a Red-tailed Hawk, or a Mourning Dove. No one is born knowing those things. I was thinking about these fictional users and their needs as I contemplated all the decisions listed in the following paragraphs.

Question: Should the guide follow scientific taxonomic order?

In many books, bird species are arranged in taxonomic order -- the official sequence proposed by the American Ornithologists’ Union (A.O.U.). That sequence is based on current scientific opinion of how different birds are related, proceeding from those thought to be most primitive to those thought to be most highly evolved. That is why so many bird books used to start with loons and end with sparrows. (The new classification starts with ducks, which are now considered to be more primitive than loons, so it’s closer now to the sequence that I used in my field guide!)

There are some good reasons for arranging a book in scientific order. Scientists will approve, expert birders will know where to find things, and it saves you the trouble of thinking up another sequence. But for the vast majority of users of a standard field guide, strict taxonomic order is not the most helpful approach.

Consider the American Coot. If you’re an experienced birder, you’ll know that the coot (like its relatives the gallinules) belongs to the rail family. But if you’re part of the other 99.9 per cent, the coot will look like a duck to you; and if you’re trying to find it in a field guide, you’ll look among the ducks. What if the coot is located 48 pages away from any ducks? What if it’s on a page where almost all the coots and gallinules are shown standing, not swimming? You may never figure out what that bird was.

We could name other examples. The A.O.U. sequence (which goes through serious changes every so often) puts vultures close to storks, and vireos close to shrikes. But vultures still LOOK more like big hawks, not like storks, and vireos LOOK more like big warblers. I believe that these similarities should dictate how the birds are arranged in a standard field guide. The purpose of a guide, obviously, is not to teach checklist sequence (which will change again anyway); it’s to allow people to put names on birds.

Question: Should the guide cover only the common species?

One approach to “simplifying” a bird guide would be to leave out some of the birds. That approach has been tried several times. But there’s nothing simple about looking up a bird that isn’t in the book. What if you go to the Everglades or the Florida Keys -- hardly unusual destinations -- and see White-crowned Pigeons, which are omitted altogether from one eastern bird guide? I believe that a field guide should cover every species that a user has a reasonable chance of seeing.

Question: Should the guide cover extreme rarities?

Generally, I’d say no. People who go to Alaskan islands searching for rare stray birds from Asia, or who take deep-water boat trips in search of rare seabirds, will usually go on organized trips with skilled leaders and detailed reference books. There’s no reason to take up space in a standard field guide to cover the ultra-rarities that very few people can hope to see.

In a different category are those things that might show up more widely. I decided to include the Green Violet-ear, because this tropical hummingbird is now turning up somewhere almost every year, and it may be at the feeder outside your window tomorrow. On the other hand, I chose not to include the Little Stint. That Eurasian sandpiper occurs as often in North America as the Green Violet-ear, but it’s much, much harder to identify. The typical birder, still struggling to tell Least and Semipalmated Sandpipers apart, should not even be thinking about Little Stints. Including that species would make the guide more cluttered and less useful.

Question: Should the guide show differences among local subspecies, that is, local variations within a species?

My answer here is “yes and no.” For species that vary a lot, it should show extremes of variation. For example, some subspecies (races) of Fox Sparrows are bright foxy-red, some are gray, some are chocolate-brown. It would be misleading to show only one or two of these types. But it can be just as misleading to label the illustrations with the scientific name of the subspecies, as some recent guides have done. Many times in the last decade I’ve seen birders confidently identifying Fox Sparrows as belonging to the race iliaca, based on the treatment in their field guides. But half the time, those birders were wrong -- the birds were really of the race zaboria, which looks very similar but is usually not illustrated. It isn’t the birders’ fault, it’s the fault of their field guides, which give the illusion of completeness by including the subspecies names.

Question: Should the guide go into lots of detail about the most difficult identifications?

I’d say no, not if it’s a standard field guide. There isn’t room. Some recent guides have tried to get around this with brief mentions of technical field marks -- like, “shorter primary tip projection with three, not four, staggered primary tips.” Say what? Sure, I know what this means, and maybe you do too if you’ve read detailed accounts of how to identify golden plovers. But if you don’t already understand it, you don’t have a chance of figuring it out from this brief statement. An expert might applaud the inclusion of such tidbits, but they’re really a confusing waste of space for the great majority of field guide users.

It may be apparent by now that there are two basic approaches to doing a field guide. One is to cater to the experts, knowing that they’re the ones who will write most of the reviews. The other is to cater to the people who really need field guides -- and then brace yourself for criticism from the experts. It’s a funny/sad fact that if you want to write a bird book for the general public, one of your biggest obstacles will be opposition from some serious birders.

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One of the great things about bird watching is that it can be enjoyed at many different levels. Even if you devote years of concentration to birds, as I have, you can still find absorbing challenges in the most difficult identifications. (And today, you’ll find lots of wonderful, detailed, advanced identification guides to bolster your approach.) At the other extreme, you can go out a few times a year and have fun figuring out a few more of your local birds each time.

Is one of these levels “better” than another? Of course not. I firmly believe that birding is something that we do for enjoyment -- so if you enjoy it, you’re automatically a good birder, regardless of how many species you can identify.

Unfortunately, some serious birders can’t see it that way. They’ll insist that every beginner should start off with an “advanced” bird guide, so that they’ll develop into experts more rapidly. But here’s some news: the typical beginner -- the one who makes up 99.9 per cent of the bird watching public -- has other interests besides birds, and other demands on his/her time, and will never be able to devote a lot of time to developing their skill. The typical beginner will never become an expert, AND THERE IS NO REASON WHY THEY SHOULD. The purpose of a standard field guide is NOT to turn beginners into experts, but rather to help people enjoy birding. Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? I continue to be amazed by the arrogance of some hotshots who insist that no one should be allowed to just go birding for fun.

Why, after being a “serious” birder all my life, have I come to care so much about beginning / casual birders? Simple answer. Bird habitats face monumental threats. Birds and nature need all the friends they can get. We don’t necessarily need more people who can discuss the tertial patterns of second-winter Thayer’s Gulls, but we do need more people who have maybe identified a Yellow Warbler and who know there’s some connection between birds and habitat. I’d like to get tons of people to the stage of knowing and appreciating some of the birds they see. If a few of them go on to become experts, that’s fine, but it’s not the most important thing.

Anyone who cares about conservation should want birding to be as open and welcoming and inclusive as possible. We need to cater to the entry level, the first step -- not insist that everyone should learn to swim by being dumped into the deep end of the pool. So unless I write another field guide with the word "advanced" in the title, you can assume that it is intended to make the first step into birding or natural history as easy as possible, to try to get more people involved with the subject.