Michael O’Brien, Richard Crossley, Kevin Karlson: The Shorebird Guide

The author isn’t always responsible for the title that appears on his or her books, and though I don’t know for sure, I’d guess that at least the typography on the cover of this one caused its authors a moment’s discomfort. The Shorebird Guide, it’s called. The designer’s italics were probably meant as nothing more than a little visual spice; but read that title aloud, and you’ll see that it in fact issues a challenge and stakes a claim: this is not, the title seems to say, just any shorebird book.

A bold word, that italicized the. Open the book, though, and you’ll find the assertion it makes more than borne out. This is, in fact, a book so far ahead of its competition that it is likely to remain the shorebird identification resource for years to come, and no field guide of the future, whatever its focus, will go uninfluenced by the many ingenious innovations that make this volume truly essential to every birder’s bookshelf.

The success of the book is due, of course, to the expertise of its three authors, whose knowledge is surpassed only by the unobtrusive skill with which they share it. But equally important, TSG is a triumph of book design, presenting a terrific amount of information in a way that makes learning not just effortless but inevitable.

TSG is a photographic guide, but it suffers from none of the constraints that make most such works a distant second to their more traditionally illustrated competitors. Most photo guides still mimic the layout of guides using paintings, subordinating their images to the text; TSGÂ takes a completely new approach, and it is most decidedly the photos (300 pages of them!) that tell the identification story here. The captions accompanying the images are extremely concise, models of clarity and precision that point out the salient features illustrated; many captions also include a self-quiz question or two, with the answers in an appendix. Errors in the captions are virtually non-existent, and none of them more than trivial: no answer is given to quiz 163.5 (it’s not a hard one, though!), for example, and the Semipalmated Sandpiper in 164.10 is actually at the lower left; the Northern Lapwing is unidentified in 276.2, and the wing-coverts mentioned in 284.5 are in fact almost entirely invisible beneath the lower scapulars of this Red-necked Stint.

Many of these photos will startle readers expecting the portrait shots typically used in field guides. There are some very beautiful images here, but for the most part the authors have selected photos that are instructive rather than breath-taking, and that “present a more real-life image of each species, including distant birds, mixed-species flocks, and varied lighting….a much more realistic impression of each species” (23). Thus, for example, one photo shows a Spoon-billed Sandpiper with its bill nearly invisible, and another a sleeping gang of Surfbirds mixed in with other tucked rockpipers. Even badly unfocused background birds, sunset silhouettes, and birds crouched on their nests are fair game–some of them even made the subject of quizes.

Nearly every opening reveals the care with which these photographs were selected. The eleven photos of Baird’s Sandpiper, for example, not only depict the field marks of each age-class and seasonal plumage, but also just happen to show Baird’s side-by-side with each of the species it is most often confused with: Least, Semipalmated, White-rumped, and Pectoral Sandpipers. This is no coincidence, and such direct visual confrontations of confusion species will be a tremendous help to beginning shorebirders.

TSG also features more explicit comparison spreads; because, again, the photos are not subjected to the constraints of a text-based guide, these images fit seamlessly into the book’s overall design. Thus, half a dozen photos compare the “white-rumped” races of Whimbrel with the familiar North American subspecies; similar comparisons are provided for the Eastern and Western Willet (treated here as candidates for full species status) and for five subspecies of Dunlin. While variation within species is an important topic here (the Sanderling photo 142.9 is worth buying the entire book for), an entire opening is also devoted to stints, with the juveniles neatly depicted in identical poses. In the case of some particularly subtle identifications, insets of similar species are used to good effect.

The photographs are followed by 150 pages of species accounts, covering the status and distribution, taxonomy, behavior, migration, molt patterns, and voice of each of the more than 90 shorebird species included. Ranging from half a page to three times that length, these prose accounts are well written and concise, with clear emphasis on characteristics  relevant to  identification; especially welcome are the extremely detailed entries on migration range and phenology, broken down by region and by age- and sex-class where appropriate, and a fine supplement to the excellent range maps (which are, somewhat puzzlingly, placed not here but among the photos). Molt is also discussed in detail, with explicit indications of those species for which the presence or absence of active molt can be of use to identification. The voice descriptions here are thorough and evocative; a companion cd of the most frequently heard vocalizations of at least the common shorebird species would have been a very useful addition.

It should be pointed out that with the publication of the latest supplement to the AOU Check-list, the taxonomy of the tattlers and willets as presented here is out of date; Gray-tailed and Wandering Tattlers and both taxa of Willet are now included in the genus Tringa, along with the ’shanks’. The use on p. 329 of “Mongolian Plover” in reference to the northern group of Lesser Sand-Plover should probably have been explained.

This book presents a wealth of visual and verbal information, much of it quite detailed; but it is not the details that the reader is intended to take away. Both the Preface and the introductory “How to Identify Shorebirds” section of TSG announce a new, “simplified” approach to the challenges posed by wader identification, an approach based not in the first instance on the precise pattern of a bird’s scapulars or the ratio of exposed tibia to culmen, but on the first characteristics noted by the trained eye: size, structure, and behavior. This, of course, is “gestalt identification,” “jizz,” “birding by impression”; this method is how most birders come to identify most of their birds, but in a tradition that still privileges the Petersonian arrow, this approach has rarely been made the subject of a book. It is no surprise, of course, that all three of the authors of TSG have strong connections to Cape May, where this method of birding was elaborated (and the birthplace of such manifestos of jizz as Hawks in Flight and Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion). Only a Cape May birder, and a very good one, could write under a photograph showing two species of dowitcher that “the Long-billed is the big fat one”!

And it is. The simplified approach to shorebird identification works, and the photos and texts presented here will go a long ways towards teaching even the least experienced wader-watcher what to look for and how to assess what s/he sees. I suspect, however, that TSG will be even more useful to intermediate and even advanced birders, who will find in this guide a new vocabulary to help them make explicit the features they already semi-consciously use to make their identifications.

The guide concludes with a thorough glossary (the entry for “split supercilium,” apparently an afterthought, is out of alphabetical order). The bibliography, though extensive, omits mention of either of the MacMillan identification guides, both of which treat an extensive selection of difficult shorebirds; Engelmoer and Roselaar is also omitted, a surprise in a book that pays such careful attention to geographic variation. Several bird-finding guides are cited only in superseded editions.

TSG is the finest shorebird book, and one of the finest guides to any group of birds, ever published. Quality comes at a price, though, in this case the book’s heroic dimensions: the book is nearly the size of a big Sibley, and our kitchen scale shows it coming in at a bit more than 1,100 grams, the unavoidable result of photos printed on glossy paper. But shorebirding is a sedentary sport, and there is no reason not to prop this book against a lawn chair at your favorite marsh, mudflat, or sewage pond. And be prepared to be dazzled by what truly is The shorebird guide.