Customer Book Review

We first learned of Sibley's Guide to Birds years ago through a wonderful recommendation by naturalish Terry Tempest Williams. Now, we couldn't be happier to have this review from Todd Newberry, an expert in his field, whose support and dedication to the local birding community is a real treasure.

The Sibley Guide to Birds
by Audubon Society Staff (Editor), David Allen Sibley (Illustrator)
(Audubon Society Nature Guides Ser., $35.00)

We birders greet each new field guide the way tennis players greet a new racquet: hereat last is the one that will make our game! When it appeared in the 1930s, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide To The Birds was such a godsend. Enthusiasts armed just with binoculars now could hope to identify most eastern birds most of the time. This achievement marked the end of the shotgun approach required (literally) of earlier generations. In tennis terms, Peterson's book was the first laminated racquet.

That guide and its counterpart A Field Guide To Western Birds combine clear artwork, concise text, and superb design to remain probably the best field guides for novice and intermediate birders. Hoary rivals like the Golden Press Birds Of North America (Robbins et al.) and newer ones like All The Birds (Amer. Bird Cons.) and Kaufman's Birds Of North America and photo-based ones like the Stokes Field Guides To Birds have their strengths. But these alternatives tend to prove less than satisfactory as their novelty wears off or their user gains expertise and confidence.

Since the 1980s, more advanced birders have adopted the National Geographic Society's Field Guide To The Birds Of North America. It covers the whole continent north of Mexico, and it treats many more plumage-variations and other sticking points than Peterson does. If you "know your birds," you are likely to use this book. But for less experienced birders the NGS guide can be a rather overwhelming workhorse - too much of a good thing. And its latest revision, despite improvements, retains or even adds little flaws that written-in fixes, when needed in too great quantity, can remedy only so far.

Enter David Sibley and the National Audubon Society's The Sibley Guide To Birds. Here is a new kind of racquet - the first maxi. And maxi it is - big and heavy. Sibley devotes at least a half-page, often a full page or even more, to each species. He places similar-looking ones beside each other to ease cross-checking. He uses a strictly repeated format, so that one can go right to the same trait in different birds - by habitat and habit, flight behavior, age, sex, voice, range and geographic variation. He introduces groups of species together to facilitate comparisons. If the information is there, a user can find it quickly. If it isn't, the quantities of blank space on each page - one cause of the book's unfortunate heftiness - can be turned to advantage: room to write your notes.

Despite all he packs in, Sibley has cut his text to a minimum. He annotates his splendid pictures with the least possible textual chatter. This works, but I find it works best along with the NGS Guide. A little murmured encouragement on the side does wonders when one is trying to separate fall warblers or winter sparrows!

Its pictures carry this book. Readers have noticed that some of the reds and blues are garish. Sibley, who keeps a web site for this book, promises to tone these down in a future printing. The fault merely shows again that all authors who use colored inks are at the mercy of their often distant plate-printers, in this case apparently one in Hong Kong.

While the insistent use of profiles at first seems to impose an arbitrary rigidity on his depictions, perhaps Sibley realized that the variety of "life-like" poses in some field guides often just complicates matters for users trying to make detailed comparisons. Instead, we can adjust the standard model mentally. On the other hand, little profiles of songbirds in flight are a new twist; we shall see how useful they prove, or whether making sense of these swift glimpses depends too much on field experience to be conveyed on paper.

The Sibley Guide has enriched my field days. But, big and heavy as it is, I leave it in the car and tote only my NGS guide on the trail. Or often I tote no book at all. Field guides are not quite like tennis racquets, after all: once modestly skilled, you can play the game of birding better without them. Encounters with puzzling birds are usually all too brief. In the few seconds you have, you must focus your all on the puzzle. Better then to study the bird than a book. Back at the car, you may regret having skipped some crucial detail, but this is how one learns to notice. In any case, that puzzling species is almost sure to turn up again, or a quick return to the scene may settle matters then and there; in birding, being stumped is temporary.

Europeans have long been the envy of the world with their remarkable field guides, best of all the new "Collins/Princeton Guide" Birds Of Europe (Mullarney et al.), which almost manages to be a "Sibley" of pocket dimensions. But The Sibley Guide To Birds, so brawny and so ambitious, is in an American class by itself. This book raises the game of birding toward a new, if unattainable, goal: not only to identify most birds most of the time, but even to identify all of them all the time. For us, is it the ultimate racquet?