I’m standing on a high lookout near a spectacular three-tiered waterfall in Australia’s Blue Mountains National Park. The peaks in the far distance reflect sunshine scattered through a haze of aromatic eucalyptus oil; the light has turned them a pale and dusty blue. At my feet the land falls away into a virgin forest of graceful, pale-barked trees that runs as far as the eye can see. Farther up the slope are leggy shrubs with flowers resembling bright plastic hair curlers: banksias, I think. When a small bird appears in the foliage below I fix it in my binoculars. White, black and acid yellow, it has eyes like tiny silver coins, and it is wiping its downcurved beak on a branch of a shrub with strappy leaves. I don’t know what the shrub is, and I’m not sure what the bird is, either. I think it’s a honeyeater, but I don’t know what anything is, not precisely. The air smells faintly of old paper and something strangely like jet fuel. I feel lost and very far from home.
I grew up in a house full of natural-history field guides, everything from Locket and Millidge’s 1951 two-volume guide to British spiders, with its hairy, many-eyed line drawings, to illustrated books on trees, fungi, orchids, fishes and snails. These books were the unquestioned authorities of my childhood. I marveled at the names entomologists had given to moths — the figure of 80, the dingy mocha, the dentated pug — and tried to match their descriptions to the drab living specimens I found on the walls of the porch on cool summer mornings. The process of working out what things were often felt like trying to solve a recalcitrant crossword puzzle, particularly when it involved learning technical terms like scopulae and thalli. The more animals and plants I learned, the larger, more complicated and more familiar the world around me became.
It was a long time before I finally understood that even the simplest of field guides are far from transparent windows onto nature: You have to learn how to read them against the messiness of reality. Out in the field, birds and insects are often seen briefly, at a distance, in low light or half-obscured by foliage; they do not resemble the tabular arrangements of paintings in guides, where similar species are brought together on a plain background on the same page, all facing one way and bathed in bright, shadowless light so they may be easily compared. To use field guides successfully, you must learn to ask the right questions of the living organism in front of you: Assess its size and habitat, disassemble it into relevant details (tail length, leg length, particular patterns of wing cases or scales or plumage), check each against images of similar species, read the accompanying text, squint at tiny maps showing the animal’s usual geographical range, then look back to the image again, refining your identification until you have fixed it to your satisfaction.
The process of identifying animals in this way has fascinating historical roots, for field guides closely track changes in the ways we interact with nature. Until the early years of the 20th century, guides to birds, for example, tended to come in two kinds. Some were moralized, anthropomorphic life histories, like Florence Merriam’s 1889 “Birds Through an Opera-Glass,” which described the bluebird as having a “model temper” while the catbird possessed a “lazy self-indulgence.” “If he were a man,” she wrote, “you feel confident that he would sit in shirt sleeves at home and go on the street without a collar.” The other kind of guide was the technical volume for ornithological collectors. Birds were generally identified only after being shot, so such guides focused on fine details of plumage and soft parts. “Web between bases of inner and middle toes,” runs the description of the semipalmated plover in Chapman’s 1912 edition of his “Color Key to North American Birds.” But with the rise of recreational bird-watching following the First World War, when the morality of killing birds was increasingly questioned and the advent of inexpensive binoculars brought birds into visual range, such details were of limited use. A new way to identify birds was needed.
The first of the modern field guides was Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 “Field Guide to the Birds.” It was inspired partly by a chapter in the popular 1903 children’s book “Two Little Savages,” written by Ernest Thompson Seton, first chief scout of the Boy Scouts of America. In it, a nature-minded boy despairs of learning the birds from books that require you to hold them dead in your hands. He decides instead to make “far-sketches” of the ducks he sees in the distance and arrange them into a “duck chart” that shows the characteristic “blots and streaks that are their labels … like the uniforms of soldiers.” Peterson’s paintings, like Seton’s charts, tabulated and simplified birds, and he added small black lines on the page that pointed to distinctive characteristics that were most easily visible: the black band on the end of a crested caracara’s tail, the “ink-dipped” wings of the flying kittiwake.
When he was a young man in the 1920s, Peterson was a member of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group of competitive, iconoclastic young naturalists. In the days before portable guides, field identification aids could take unusual forms: A club founder carried around an envelope containing colored plates cut from a copy of E. H. Eaton’s lavish but unwieldy ornithological guide, “Birds of New York,” that he had found in a trash can. The group was mentored by Ludlow Griscom, a stern, exacting teacher renowned for inventing the technique of identifying a bird instantly in the field, even when flying. “All the thousands of fragments we know about birds — locality, season, habitat, voice, actions, field marks and likelihood of occurrence — flash across the mirrors of the mind and fall into place — and we have the name of the bird,” Peterson later explained of Griscom’s method. This split-second, gestalt ability to recognize a species, built from combining book knowledge with long field experience, became the mark of ornithological expertise, and was at the heart of a growing culture of competitive bird-spotting that lives on. There’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and every time you learn to recognize a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless gray and green.
Today, electronic field guides are becoming increasingly popular, and photo-recognition apps like Leafsnap and Merlin Bird ID let you identify species without the skills required to use field guides. They can do what print guides cannot: play animal sounds and songs, for example. But they also make it harder to learn those things we unconsciously absorb from field guides: family resemblances among species, or their places in the taxonomic order. When I was growing up, the materiality of these guides, their weight and beauty, was part of their attraction. I spent hours staring at their colored plates of butterflies and birds, distinguishing each from each and fixing the painted images in my mind. The first time I saw a silver-spotted skipper butterfly basking on bare chalk on high downland pasture, I instantly knew the name of this dusty-golden dart with pale, ragged patches on its wings. Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen before.
Back in my hotel room, I pull two Australian field guides from the bottom of my suitcase, eager to know what I’ve seen. Flicking through the first, I find a page of honeyeaters: nine birds arranged on a pale green background. That striking pattern of white and yellow and black is found in two species, but those round silver eyes are distinctive. I check against the distribution maps and the short description on the facing page. What I saw was a New Holland honeyeater. And turning to the plant guide, which describes only a few hundred of the 30,000 different plant species found in Australia, I decide, tentatively, that the shrub it sat on was probably a waratah, and the banksias I saw by the path were hairpin banksias, with their “protruding, wiry, hooked styles.” These species are well known here, but for me they are small triumphs. Now I know three things. A few hours ago, I looked over a valley at sunset and knew nothing at all.
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