How to Choose a Birding Field Guide

Video Transcript

"Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I direct the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Important Bird Areas Program for Massachusetts. Today, we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts. And, we're going to be talking about the equipment needed to get one started in birding. Back to our essentials, we've talked about optics. We've talked about the field notebook. Now, we need to talk about field guides, basic recognition books that will allow you to identify some of the birds that you see. And, all I can say is that there is a plethora of possibilities. I've spread out four different versions of what I think for many are some of the leading and most popular field guides. Some of the things that we need to think about is whether we prefer paintings of this sort where various artists in the case of the National Geographic Field Guide have contributed. The Sibley Guide, where David Sibley has personally provided all of these stunning images to accompany the text. Or, whether we might prefer photographs. And in the Koffman Guide, for example, we find that digital images have been used so that the user is actually looking at photographs of real birds. Roger Tory Peterson in 1934 was the individual who probably is generally thought of as the progenitor of some of the most popular guides today. Peterson used illustrations and paintings and was the first to develop the concept of the diagnostic arrow that would point at various features of the birds to highlight characteristics that could be seen in the field. But, regardless of which of the various field guides you prefer, whether it's a photo guide or whether it's one that uses paintings and illustrations, the important thing is to get one that works for you. To get familiar with the way it's laid out. The concepts, we'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes."