Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion
ByNot that many centuries ago, poetry was the usual mode of composition for all sorts of learned and scholarly texts. From the days of Lucretius to the end of the European Middle Ages, even natural history treatises were as likely to be written in verse as in the workaday language of prose. It’s different now, of course, and no one at the beginning of the twenty-first century would dream of producing a serious work on a scientific subject in any medium but prose–no one, that is to say, but Pete Dunne, whose Essential Field Guide Companion turns out to be the longest, the densest, and the most wonderful poem ever written about the birds of North America.
The Companion grew out of Dunne’s work on the posthumous fifth edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide. As one of the editorial team entrusted with seeing that book to press, Dunne was continually frustrated at having to sacrifice his descriptions of important behavioral characteristics to the tyranny of a page count. One of the founders of “The Cape May School,” Dunne considers behavior, expression, and attitude (the bird’s!) at least as significant as the fine details of structure and plumage stressed by the proponents of “The New Approach.” The Companion elaborates the Cape May method in individual accounts for almost 700 taxa, opening birders’ eyes and minds to a different and exciting way to watch the birds around them.
Each species or identifiable form (the fox-sparrows, for example, are given four entries) is treated in an average of two columns of densely printed text. The accounts begin, as expected, with the English and scientific names–and then all Pete breaks loose. The official nomenclature for each bird is followed by an italicized neonym, sometimes a bit forced, sometimes a bit cutesy, but usually right on the money: Buff-breasted Flycatcher, for example, becomes “Cherubic Flycatcher,” Western Bluebird “Hooded Bluebird,” Palm Warbler “The Wagtaillike Warbler.” While the last thing beginners need is another name to memorize, at their best, Dunne’s inventions capture perfectly the aspect, the appearance, or the behavioral characteristic most typical of the species in question. Some of these names are directly comprehensible, good for an immediate smile (“Pied Scythebill” for American Avocet); others make sense only when explained farther along in the text (“Ring-tailed Marlin” for Hudsonian Godwit).
The texts begin with a brief summary of status and abundance, followed by an extremely detailed account of the species’ normal distribution. The accuracy and detail of the range statements are a great strength of the Companion, and as Dunne himself notes in his generous and gracious acknowledgments, benefited greatly from the participation of Paul Lehman, who, with Jon Dunn, knows more about the distribution of North American birds than anyone living. in fact, a first reading reveals only one major error, in the breeding range of Lesser Goldfinch (a species that does not breed in or migrate out of southwest Nebraska). Vagrancy is treated rather summarily for most species, though all are assigned a “vagrancy index,” intended as a rough indication of how likely the bird is to appear outside of its normal range.
Among the book’s many welcome innovations is the brief section called “Cohabitants.” Following immediately on the clear, often extensive habitat descriptions, this section lists other birds, mammals, and other organisms typical of the sort of locality where the species can be found; my spot-checks have found these lists terrifically accurate for the species I know, and richly suggestive for those I don’t. I might point out, however, that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is more profitably sought in the company of Generalissimo Franco than of Lazarus.
The meat of any field guide (or companion) is in the descriptions; but these are unlike any descriptions you’ve ever read. Many of them are even more extravagant than the corresponding passages in Hawks in Flight, the Companion’s most obvious ancestor. Barred Owl, for example, is “big, imposing, barrel-shaped, somber-eyed,” and seems to be “wearing a shabby stain-streaked coat with a closed fur collar.” These aren’t your grandparents’ field marks, and it gets even better: “The expression ranges from haunted to really ticked off.” This is powerful, effective, evocative language, and such remarks call the bird more immediately and more vividly to mind than any number of Peterson-arrows and Sibley-captions. Dunne warns the reader on the very first page of the Companion that there are no “illustrations” in the book: he’s being disingenuous, as many of the word portraits so ably painted here are–for the birder with even a modicum of experience–a more memorable and more useful gallery than the plates of a dozen field guides. Only those beginners who have not yet compiled their mental image-stock will find themselves occasionally puzzled by these descriptions.
The wealth of witty metaphor continues into the sections labeled “Behavior” and “Flight.” The behavior entries contain both straightforward ‘facts’ (Carolina Wrens do not flock) and carefully observed minutiae expressed in the most visible possible terms: that same troglodytid is said to be “industrious but deliberate” in its actions, moving in “jerky hops” from thicket to man-made debris and back again. This section often reads like a direct transcription of the author’s field notes, its apparent immediacy engaging to the point of exciting; it is as if we were watching the bird with Dunne, who points out the tiny traits that we might have missed but that are ultimately constitutive of the typical aspect of the species before us. At their best, these behavior portraits are dead on, and call to mind precise images of birds not recently seen; if the occasional example is less successful, merely impressionistic, that may in some cases have more to do with the reader’s experience than with the author’s ability to describe his own.
The most eagerly awaited element of the species accounts in the Companion is the description of the flight habit of every species included. With big Sibley at hand, we now have images and written descriptions of the flight pattern and behavior of nearly 700 species in North America. As admirers of Hawks in Flight know, Dunne has no equal in his ability to capture in well-chosen, often surprising words the appearance of birds in flight, at any distance. There are hundreds of breathtaking examples in the Companion, and no one who writes about the flight of North American birds will ever again be able to do so without borrowing, refining, or consciously rejecting the lexicon Dunne has assembled here.
As spectacular as the “Flight” accounts are, those sections do reveal the one slight weakness in the Companion. I have spent the last week or so checking Dunne’s descriptions against my own experiences in the field, and I have found consistently that the very best of his attempts to capture flight in words pertain to birds common in the East, and the weakest are limited to species more common in the West. A similar disparity is, very occasionally, apparent in the sections headed “Vocalizations”; never exactly inaccurate, the descriptions of a few western voices seem just a little less vivid than the verbalizations given their eastern counterparts. This is hardly a complaint, but rather an encouragement to western birders to apply to “our species” and the ways we talk about them the methods and the vocabulary used by Dunne to such magical effect on eastern birds.
Impressions, metaphors, comparisons: these are the stock in trade of this strange and wonderful book. As effective and evocative as most of them are, not every one of the verbal figures here “works” for me with equal effect, and in a few cases I have found myself substituting my own adjectives, my own anthropomorphic characterizations, for those that just don’t capture the bird in the way I think it deserves. But that’s the point of this truly essential Companion: to set an example, to provide a method, to inspire birders to start thinking and talking about their birds in new ways.
