Dennis Paulson, Shorebirds of North America: The Photographic Guide

A generation ago, you could get a brawl started in just about any birder bar with one simple question: Photos or paintings?

For many of us, the answer was easy; good books, like the National Geographic Field Guide, were illustrated with paintings (of variable quality, of course), and bad books, like the disastrous National Audubon Society Field Guides, had photographs (of almost invariable quality, alas). The photographic Master Guide to Birding, published in the same annus mirabilis as NatGeo, dropped a small fly into our intellectual ointment, but I remember discussions of even those fine volumes that finished up with a wistful sigh: “If only they’d used paintings….”

Others may have come ’round sooner, but it took almost 20 years and the genius of Steve Howell to change my mind about using photographs to illustrate identification guides. Howell’s Hummingbirds of North America was an eye-opener: not just for the tremendous amount of new or little-known information it made available, but for its incredibly effective use of large-format photographs in an “open,” flexible book design. Photographs, it turns out, have terrific advantages if they are not used just as “better paintings”; for a vivid negative example, compare Howell’s miraculous book with the trochilid volume in the Peterson series, which appeared at the same time and also uses photos–but simply and unimaginatively as replacements for paintings, with no design accommodations to the special demands and advantages of the medium.

First published by Academic Press, Howell’s Hummingbirds soon appeared under the imprint of Princeton University Press, which has followed this first title with other Photographic Guides to emberizid sparrows and, most recently, tanagers, cardinals, and fringillids. Neither of the passerine volumes is overly successful, in large part, I think, because the format of the PUP guides has not just crystallized but petrified following the success of Howell’s pioneering effort. My sense is that the photos have become smaller and fewer, the texts less and less expansive, and what must have been the authors’ feelings of constraint are matched only by the reader’s occasional frustration in wanting just one more image, one more sentence, to clear up the especially thorny identification issues posed by these difficult groups.

Unlike the passerine volumes, Dennis Paulson’s Shorebirds of North America is able to largely overcome the restrictions imposed by its photographic format. Paulson, one of the world’s best-known experts on sandpipers, plovers, and their charming kin, is the author of Shorebirds of the Pacific Northwest, in spite of the title’s inaccurate hint at geographical narrowness, an essential addition to every shorebirder’s library; he is also the emeritus curator of the Slater Museum at the University of Puget Sound, home of the finest online collection of digitized wing photos anywhere (http://www.ups.edu/x5662.xml).

Where Northwest is a comprehensive handbook treating shorebird biology and ecology in the north Pacific, Paulson’s Photographic Guide, like the other titles in the series, is intended as an identification help. Taking the geographic terms of its title literally, the book covers all 94 (!) species in the group to have occurred in North America, from the Bering Sea islands, to Panama, including a dozen species represented by only a few records; Eskimo and Slender-billed Curlews, both likely no longer among us, are also treated.

The guide begins with the expected introduction to shorebirds as a group and their identification challenges. One innovation here, and not a particularly welcome one, is the substitution of the term “anatomy” for the more familiar label “topography” on the excellent photos showing the zones of a wader’s plumage: it strikes me as odd, even wrong, to say that the “belly” is part of the Western Sandpiper’s anatomy, or that the head anatomy of a Whimbrel includes its median crown stripe and eyering. It should be noted, too, that in my copy at least, the labels for foreneck and throat in figure I.1 have gone slightly astray in the publication process.

The introductory matter also includes some fascinating and well-written information on variation, behavior, conservation status, and molt. Though awkwardly formatted across a page-turn, Table 3, which lists population estimates for all North American breeders, is a chilling reminder of how absolutely rare many of these species are: some of us would have to share if the world population of Least Sandpiper were divvied up among the residents of Tucson, and if I had a nickel for every Solitary Sandpiper, well, I could almost afford a pair of the new Zeiss I was panting over at the ABA Convention last month.

The brief section on molt in shorebirds will be helpful to many birders; I wish only that the importance of molt in resolving some difficult identification problems were more heavily stressed here. In a dictum almost obiter, Paulson notes that Greater Yellowlegs, Least Sandpiper, and Long-billed Dowitcher “complete flight-feather molt when they stop somewhere along the route” of their southward migration; this is potentially extremely useful information, but an identification guide should highlight it rather than simply mentioning it as an interesting fact.

Similar failures to emphasize what is truly vital to the reader interested in identification continue throughout the species accounts. The fact that Pacific Golden-Plovers seem to have completed their pre-basic molt before arriving in North America, while many American Golden-Plovers are still in non-breeding dress, is buried in the “Plumages” section for both species and goes unmentioned under the rubric “Identification,” which is surely where birders will turn first when confronted with an individual of what might be the “wrong” species. Similarly, the best marks for Black-bellied Plover come only at the end of the account for that species, and the shockingly white underparts of flying Killdeer (in my experience, the feature first noticed by beginning birders) are summarized in the single phrase “white below.” The experienced birder and the careful reader (or the careful birder and the experienced reader!) will find much of value in every one of these entries, but as a guide to identification, the book would be more immediately useful had it made a point of presenting the most important information first, what the linguists call “topicalization.”

That complaint made (and it is a serious one for new birders and birders just embarking on their discovery of the wonders of shorebirds), I should point out that the information provided here, however occasionally awkward its presentation, is both rich and accurate. Only rarely are there minor errors, and those can be considered editorial lapses rather than factual slips: to say, for example, that “European [Golden-Plover] has plainest head among Pluvialis” is simply an oversight (Black-bellied Plover is blanker-faced in winter). More serious is the apparent mix-up in the description of the wing-patterns of the sand-plovers; I have experience with neither species in life (more’s the pity), but the mention of the “dusky comma” on the underwing of Lesser Sand-Plover seems not to match up with the spread-wing photos and the caption in figure 8.6. The description of neck color in stilts could also have been made clearer; a birder with no experience of Black-winged Stilt could be forgiven her confusion on reading that that species “always” has a pale hindneck, then in the next paragraph being assured that the “black of the hindneck [is] interrupted by [a] pale band.”

The photos, of course, are at the heart of this book, and simply flipping pages finds image after image that I am tempted to label a favorite; but Mike Lane’s Temminck’s Stint in flight and Peter LaTourett’s head-on Pectoral Sandpiper are particularly breath-taking. It is no accident that those photos are among the few in the book that occupy full half-pages; many others are as informative and as beautiful, but one of the lessons of the photographic guide is (or should have been!) that photos, with their unavoidable detail and potentially distracting backgrounds, truly come into their own only when reproduced at an appropriate size. The hundreds of images here printed three to a page, or crowded by sharing the page with extensive text, are simply not as appealing, and while I understand the unpleasant economic realities of the publishing business, I still find myself wishing that Paulson had been given another few hundred pages to present his text and the photos in their full, relaxed glory.

All of the more than 500 photos are fully captioned, with location, date, photographer’s name, and an observation on the identification of the depicted individual to species, subspecies, age, or sex. These captions, brilliantly exploited in Steve Howell’s Hummingbirds, are not taken full advantage of here. The pattern of the secondaries in Greater Yellowlegs, for example, is clearly shown in image 29.5, but the caption merely recapitulates the very general marks that distinguish both the yellow-footed Tringa from other mid-sized sandpipers. The unique advantages afforded by the format of a photographic guide, where images can be discussed specifically and in detail, go largely unexploited here, the captions for the most part simply repeating information (and not always the salient information) from the prose texts rather than pointing precisely to features difficult to describe in words but visible in the images. Conversely, certain characteristics discussed at length in the text, such as the underwing patterns of Green and Wood Sandpipers, are not visible on any of the accompanying photographs, raising once again one of the oldest objections to photographic guides, namely, that they are limited to the available material rather than being able to take advantage of the painter’s experience and skills.

Paulson’s Photographic Guide is an important and frequently beautiful book that no shorebird enthusiast will want to be without. The slight flaws described above will likely lead the book, intended as a field guide, to a place on the reference shelf, where the information it contains can be mined in a more leisurely way than is needed in the heat of a late July mudflat. As a collection of well-reproduced and clearly labeled images, it surpasses both Rosair and Chandler, and the identification information it contains is a valuable supplement and update to Marchant and Prater. All the same, I have found myself using Dennis Paulson’s splendid Northwest more than this title, and highly recommend the older book for those interested in the identification, the biology, and the ecology of these most beautiful inhabitants of beach and mud.