The discovery last month in California of the striking hybrid shorebird to be known as “Mulrooney’s Sandpiper” sent us back to the books. A scant generation ago, not even the Californians would have known what to do with it, a bird never before recorded by science, its identification uncertain and its parentage unknown.

Today, of course, in addition to the famous sophistication of southern California’s birding community, we also have digital photography, internet discussion lists, and books–of the making of many of which there is no end.

Modern shorebirding began for many of us in 1977 with the appearance of the BTO’s Guide to the Identification and Ageing  of Holarctic Waders.

Intended in the first instance as a manual for shorebird banders, this book revolutionized the way that birders, in Europe and then, haltingly, in the US, looked at waders. After decades of puzzlement over shorebird plumages unillustrated and undescribed in the standard field guides, suddenly we learned about the molts and annual cycles of these birds, and came to appreciate both subtle distinctions between species and, even more importantly, the overlap (even the downright fallacy) of many field characters promulgated in the past.

A short decade later, Hayman, Marchant, and Prater (the latter two among the authors of the BTO guide) published Shorebirds, perhaps the best of the modern family identification monographs. The richly detailed text and hundreds of beautiful paintings of that book quickly made it a classic, and for nearly a quarter century there hasn’t been a late summer mudflat in the world where that familiar blue dust jacket hasn’t been brought forth to settle–or to start–an argument or two.

With a couple of relatively undistinguished exceptions–Taylor and Message springs to mind–Hayman, Marchant, and Prater was the last important shorebird book to be illustrated with paintings; nearly all the serious efforts in the nearly 25 years since have been photographic guides.

One of those serious efforts was made twenty years ago this year by Richard Chandler. His handy little North Atlantic Shorebirds, portable and terse, offered a wonderful precis of shorebird identification in Europe and eastern North America, but somehow never caught on with the birding public the way it should have.  Chandler’s new Shorebirds of the Northern Hemisphere, is the direct descendant of the older book, one that, as the author notes, proudly emulates the earlier title’s layout and emphasis. The result is a hefty and handsome volume, a collection of species portraits accompanied by a concise but helpful text.

In its geographic coverage, this book falls between Hayman, Marchant, and Prater, which covers the world, and Dennis Paulson’s photographic guide covering North America. The title’s claim that the book treats the waders of “the Northern Hemisphere” is not accurate, however; the area of coverage is in fact much closer to the zoogeographically defined Holarctic, a region within which Chander counts and treats 134 species of shorebird (the 135th would have been Eskimo Curlew, here sadly and probably correctly presumed extinct).

Those 134 species accounts are preceded by a short introduction, a dozen pages of which are filled by Chandler’s discussion of plumage and molt. The topography diagrams, so important to an understanding of many comments in the individual species entries, are rather poorly executed echoes of Killian Mullarney’s fine drawings in The New Approach; it would have been far more enlightening to label the photographs themselves on which these inadequate sketches are based.The chart that follows, summarizing the “feather groups” of each part of the bird’s body, probably strives for too much precision when it lists among the “principal” such regions the median and lesser primary coverts of both upper and under wings; I’m also confused by the statement that the axillars are “equivalent to” the scapulars (I would rather have said they were the “counterpart” of the scapulars).

Chandler uses a slightly different terminology for molts from that many North American birders will be used to. Ultimately following Humphrey and Parkes (with salutary modifications by such learned students as Steve Howell), we’ve become accustomed to naming molts for the plumages they produce: thus, just as a pre-prandial drink leads to dinner, a pre-alternate molt leads to alternate plumage. Chandler’s terminology seems both awkwardly periphrastic and a bit of a step backward (and sometimes plain wrong: I don’t know how the second pre-alternate molt can sensibly be styled “moult to second non-breeding,” but that’s just what the terminological concordance on p. 14 gives us). Chandler uses a calendar-year system for aging shorebirds, such that a hatching-year individual becomes a second-year on January 1.

A particularly interesting section in this front matter is the brief discussion of shorebird hybrids; the frequency of apparent miscegenation in certain groups, especially Calidris, is cogently explained as the accidental result of polygyny and other unusual mating systems. Unfortunately, neither here nor anywhere else in his introduction does Chandler cite his specific sources, making it inconvenient for those of us piqued by the statement, for example, that “recent research suggests” that Black and American Oystercatches are conspecific.

The species accounts are broken into groups, some comprising a genus, some a family or two. Each such group is introduced by a clear, well-organized essay treating its worldwide distribution and the behavioral and ecological peculiarities of its members. When species in the group present identification difficulties, Chandler often provides a table for quick reference; these charts are a convenient carryover from his 1989 book (and from the tables in the appendices of Hayman, Marchant, and Prater), just the thing when you can’t remember how many primary tips a golden-plover in Tennessee “should” be showing.

The accounts themselves follow a strict pattern. First comes a brief identification summary, followed by short descriptions of plumage variations by age, sex, and where appropriate geographic distribution. A paragraph on distribution follows; the ranges are delineated in considerable detail, though the occasional geographical blooper shines through (Ontario, for example, is not on the east coast of North America–see p.143). Each species has a range map as well, all of them from the Handbook of Birds of the World; for most of us, their usefulness would be greatly improved were there any indication of political boundaries.

Many birders will find most useful the short section headed “Similar Species,” which in many accounts is the sole locus for explicit comparison between potential identification contenders; occasionally, as for Least and Long-toed Sandpiper/Stint, the comparative material is embedded in the plumage descriptions.

Most of each page is taken up by photographs, all of them dated and their locations clearly indicated. It’s particularly gratifying to see so many high-quality images of birds in flight (or at least stretching a wing). Some rare and little-known species have only a couple of images (Jerdon’s Courser is represented by a single photograph), while common, difficult, or extremely variable birds can be illustrated with a dozen or more (sixteen for Kentish/Snowy Plover). Nearly all the photos are large, nearly all beautiful portraits of some of the most attractive birds in the world.

That said, some of them, like photos in some other identification guides, fail to serve the purpose claimed for them in the text. The bill tip of the Semipalmated Sandpiper on page 225 appears to be behind a rock. The dark mottling on the irides of presumed female oystercatchers is not visible in all of the photos meant to illustrate it, and the wing coverts of the Little Ringed Plover on page 118 aren’t obviously juvenile feathers–I am sure the bird is a juvenile, but I cannot see the edgings described in the caption. Perhaps some discrete Petersonian arrows, and in a few cases a more careful selection of images, would have been helpful.

The major shortcoming of these appealing photos is the traditional layout they are forced into. The first photo depicts a juvenile, the second a first-basic individual, and so on through the seasons to an alternate adult; the final photo typically shows a spread wing or a bird in flight. Apart from the quibbles described above, there is little to take exception to here–until you want, for example, to show a beginning shorebirder the difference in bill shape between Least and Western Sandpipers. There ensues a great shuffling of pages and much confusion (“no, that picture is the Least”), and by the time you’re done, your beginner is trying to figure out whether that Stilt Sandpiper that’s just flown in is a dowitcher or a yellowlegs.

Now try the same thing with The Shorebird Guide.

Among the glorious miscellany of that miraculous book’s photographs are not just ooh-and-aah portraits, but shots of distant mixed flocks–and cannily selected comparative material to help even the neophyte grasp quickly and surely the structural differences between birds that the old-fashioned field mark method left among the confusingly similar. The Shorebird Guide is a photographic guide that takes advantages of the medium to create something entirely new, while Chandler’s volume–along with every other attempt thus far to present wader identification in a photographic format–simply translates traditional field guide models onto glossy paper.

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and the gallery of images collected in Shorebirds of the Northern Hemisphere is pleasant as a diversion and valuable as yet another archive of fine reference photos. For learning shorebirds and understanding how to look at them, though, Chandler’s volume has little to set it apart from several other, similar books. Every dedicated shorebird watcher will find a place in the bookcase for it, but most, I predict, will find themselves consulting it occasionally, while continuing to read and to relish The Shorebird Guide as far and away the best entree to this most captivating group of birds.