Archive for Houghton Mifflin
Pyle: Mariposa Road
Posted by: | CommentsIt wasn’t long before we moved to southeast Arizona for good—at last. Alison and I were coming down Miller Canyon after a quick pre-breakfast walk, and we ran into a group of binocular-wearing colleagues headed up. The usual greeting: “Seen anything?” The group’s apparent leader responded with the disyllabic question: “Sulfurs?”
Alison hesitated, puzzled, then pointed to the Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher squeaking its loud matins from the tree right above our heads. “Sulfurs?” was the bemused response.
They weren’t talking about birds.
Birders and lepers have a lot in common. Indeed, most of the latter started out as the former before discovering the pleasures of late rising and warm climates. As a result, the culture of butterflying, in North America at least, has closely mimicked the development of birding, with the signal exception of the big year: though well established in birding circles, the attempt to record as many species in a single annual cycle had never been attempted by a lepidopterist.
Until, that is, Robert Michael Pyle’s scaly-winged run in 2008.
Pyle—not to be confused with Hawaii’s ornithologist—is a highly respected butterflyer, an eloquent and influential conservationist, and a fine writer, and I was prepared to love Mariposa Highway, the account of his 2008 North American butterfly big year. Unexpectedly, however, the book (all 400+ pages of it!) never really catches fire, its gentle prose and unhurried rhythm descending—I hate to say it—into the monotonous after the first 100 pages or so.
Why?
Like most critics, I usually find it easier to identify the causes of failure than the sources of success; that’s what reviewers are for, right? It was harder this time, though, given Pyle’s long record of wonderful publications. Soon enough I found myself concentrating more on the book’s failure to excite than on the events it recounts. What happened?
It wasn’t just the occasional editorial lapse, as when the well-known state park in southeast Arizona is called “Pacheco” rather than “Picacho Peak” or when Tom Beatty of hummingbird fame is called “Bentley.” Instead, I think Mariposa’s failure to excite lies in its single-mindedness, in the static nature of its subject, and in a certain narrative solipsism. Let me explain:
Peterson and Fisher’s Wild America, which Pyle takes as his express model here, was the account of a birders’ big year—and much, much more. There was little the two friends did not stop to think about, feathered or not, natural or cultural: they spent April 19 in Concord and Lexington, they made a pilgrimage to the abandoned cabin of a Sonora Desert hermit, they ended the book with an appendix on the history of the fur seal trade. Mariposa, in contrast, gives the impression of being about butterfly twitching and very little else. I haven’t counted, but my sense is that far more words and far more pages are filled with the lister’s veni, vidi, vici in Pyle’s work than in its great predecessor; this means that a reader who is not quite as enthusiastic a lepidopterist as the author may succumb before finishing the book.
There’s something about butterflies themselves, too, that makes it much harder to keep the non-specialist reader’s attention. Put simply, they don’t really give a listing writer much to say: they may be beautiful, they may be rare, but beyond hilltopping, sucking manure, and copulating, they just don’t do much. This challenge is visible in its extreme in Pyle’s accounts of finding (and listing) butterfly eggs for his big year; I admire the author’s observational skills, but it would take a finer writer even than Pyle to generate much narrative tension out of such a find.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Pyle’s big year was conducted largely on his own. Not even when he is butterflying with others does the hopeful reader find much in the way of interpersonal interest. Pyle is as dutiful as he is obviously sincere in thanking those who helped him, but I can’t say that at the end I had any sense at all of having got to know the secondary “characters” in his story. Not even Pyle’s wife, whose illness is a moving theme running through the book, ever really takes narrative shape here. Contrast this with the complicated relationship so charmingly drawn by the authors of Wild America, or with the priceless character sketches that punctuate the account of another solo big year, Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway. In Mariposa, we learn nearly as little about the author as we do about his friends; Pyle resembles Kenny Rogers, he went to Yale, that seems to be enough.
Butterfly devotees will read this book differently and probably with greater pleasure. The rest of us may come away disappointed that Mariposa doesn’t do a better job of spinning a more interesting story around the author’s year on the butterfly road.
Thompson: Identifying and Feeding Birds
Posted by: | CommentsThis charmingly written and handsomely illustrated book purports to be for the “backyard birder”–but I doubt very much that any reader will be a “backyard birder” once she’s done. Bill Thompson does a great job here of communicating many of the basic facts about attracting and identifying the birds of suburb and farm, but even better, he reveals to the uninitiated the excitement and enjoyment to be had from going further, learning more, doing more with birds.
As the title suggests, the book has two main sections, the first a guide to creating the conditions that will make your immediate environment appealing to as many birds as possible. Feeders help, of course, and Thompson offers a thorough review of the types of food and food receptacles most likely to attract birds; but the book makes the point repeatedly and clearly that nothing makes a landscape as attractive as native plants, which can create a habitat, complete with brush piles, irresistible to the most appealing of the birds we all hope to draw to our yards.
Following a useful question-and-answer chapter, the second part of the book deals in greater detail with attracting, housing, and identifying 125 of those yard visitors. The photos, many of them stretching nearly margin to gutter, are spectacularly beautiful, and almost all well chosen; some readers may wonder, though, why there is no image of a female Purple Martin, or why an eastern, heavily spotted Downy Woodpecker is compared to a western, black-winged Hairy. One of the two photos of Yellow-rumped Warbler could profitably have been an Audubon’s, rather than devoting both to Myrtle.
It’s the responsibility of a reviewer to second-guess an author, of course, and I enjoyed leafing through the 125 “common backyard birds” to see where I might have made a different choice–not necessarily better in every case, but different. I think Turkey Vulture is a bit of a stretch, particularly given the omission of Red-tailed Hawk; Merlin, included here, is much less common as a feeder visitor in most parts of the country than is American Kestrel, barely mentioned in the text. Another little raptor, Northern Shrike, is surely more common at feeders nowadays than Loggerhead–yet the latter is given full treatment and the former not mentioned.
Band-tailed Pigeon certainly belongs in this selection, but a note should have been added that it visits backyards and feeders chiefly on the coast; this is a shy bird of high-elevation wilderness in most of its interior range. A similar note could have been given for Western Scrub-Jay, a reluctant feeder visitor inland but a voracious gobbler of seed and suet in California.
Greater Roadrunners are welcome guests in many southwestern yards, but I wish the text mentioned the dangers of feeding them meat and dog food: young birds are said to require bones and skin and feathers and scales to grow properly, which their parents can harvest just fine at the thistle feeder.
There’s no reason not to mention Western Screech-Owl along with its eastern counterpart; I’ve had far better luck luring westerns to my boxes than I ever have with easterns. Speaking again as an adoptive Arizonan, I am surprised to find the uncommonish and local Golden-fronted Woodpecker given a full page and the abundant, noisy, and relatively widespread Gila Woodpecker unmentioned. Lazuli Bunting is another obvious omission, far more frequently seen at feeders and over far longer periods of the year than Painted Bunting.
Sparrows are the highlight of any winter feeder. I envy anyone who regularly has Field Sparrows visiting, and wonder how many American Tree Sparrows–a standby at feeders across the northern tier of states but not included among the choice 125–will be misidentified this coming season as Field or Chipping. It would have been instructive to describe and to illustrate more than just Slate-colored Junco; the other juncos are dismissed here as “mostly in the West,” hardly an informative comment for a birder wondering what those black-hooded, orange-backed birds are at the millet pile.
None of those small lapses is fatal; most readers will quickly move on anyway to more comprehensive field guides. And that more than anything else is the measure of the value of this book, one that is sure to inspire its readers and to help their birds.
Howell: Molt in North American Birds
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For long decades, guides to North American birds treated seasonal and age-related differences in plumage as fixed, discrete phenomena, with hardly a hint as to just how an individual bird’s feathers might pass from immature to adult, from winter to summer, from breeding to non-breeding. Even the banding manuals implicitly instructed us to consider the colors of a plumage rather than the timing and the circumstances of its origin, so that for most species–especially passerines–we were left in those benighted pre-Pyle days with a relatively ineloquent and relatively imprecise set of age-and-sex categories into which we had to fit the victims of our nets and potter traps.
Matters improved and eyes opened with the publication in 1987 of Peter Pyle and Steve Howell’s Identification Guide to North American Passerines, which immediately rendered the erstwhile standard texts by Dwight, Roberts, and Wood obsolete; suddenly, banders and ambitious birders had a tool that let them use not the state of a bird’s plumage–properly speaking, its aspect–but rather its relationship to other, preceding and subsequent plumages to age and sex the individual with sometimes startling precision. We learned, in a moment of almost blinding clarity, that we should be paying attention to the transitions between plumages rather than to the “plumages” themselves: that we should, in other words, be concentrating on molt rather than on its product.
I’d venture to assume that nearly every birder has heard of molt, that regular process by which birds replace old, worn feathers with new, strong ones. And I’m equally certain that even today not one North American birder in ten fully recognizes the many ways in which even a simple understanding of the phenomenon can increase our enjoyment, and our knowledge, of the birds we watch in the field.
Photo: WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide.
In a series of groundbreaking articles in Birding, Birding World, Western Birds, and elsewhere, Steve Howell has been at the forefront of introducing recent discoveries about molt into our field practice as birders. Now, with his new Peterson Reference Guide, Molt in North American Birds, Howell offers birders a concise and beautifully written summary of much of what is known about molt as a phenomenon, followed by chapters dedicated to the molt “strategies” followed in every family of birds breeding in North America north of Mexico. The result is a volume that every birder will learn a great deal from–and one that, by raising repeatedly questions still unanswered by students of molt, will inspire birders, banders, and ornithologists to learn even more about this fascinating and often complicated subject.
Howell begins with a too modestly titled 65-page “Introduction” to the subject at hand, offering first a series of interrogatories on such fundamental topics as the nature of feathers and the difference between a plumage–a set of feathers produced by a molt–and an aspect–the appearance of a bird’s feather “coat” at a given time. Richly and attractively illustrated (most of the stunning photos are Howell’s own), this catechism of molt should be required reading even for birders uninterested in the phenomenon’s broader implications for birding.
In the remaining 45 introductory pages, Howell discusses the patterns and strategies of molt observable in North American birds, defining plumages using the “modified” Humphrey-Parkes system and introducing the four fundamental sequences of molt. The Basic strategies are distinguished from Alternate strategies by their lack of a pre-alternate molt (and thus of an alternate plumage); Complex strategies differ from Simple strategies in the “insertion” of an “extra,” pre-formative molt in the first molt cycle (a cycle lasts approximately a year in most familiar species). Thus, birds exhibit a Simple Basic strategy, a Complex Basic strategy, a Simple Alternate strategy, or a Complex Alternate strategy.
The strategies, and the molts and plumages they comprise, are described with admirable clarity in Howell’s text, though in this section–unlike anywhere else in the book–I found some of the illustrations and their captions less immediately comprehensible. The series of photographs tracing the progress of molts and plumages of a nuttalli (italicized, please!) White-crowned Sparrow is itself informative, though in a quibbling moment I might have preferred a subspecies where the adults’ head pattern is brighter. Unfortunately, the caption to Figure 29, showing a bird undergoing its pre-alternate molt, might easily be misread. At least the last sentence should have been rewritten, to begin “In this first-cycle bird, most of the body feathers are still formative plumage….” As the caption stands now, it could be read–as I did at first–as suggesting that all Nuttall’s White-crowns somehow retain bits of their formative and of their juvenile plumages after their limited pre-alternate molt.
Figure 36, which uses paintings familiar to many readers from David Sibley’s Birding Basics, suffers from a lapse in design: the horizontal lines separating the illustrations of each strategy from their label should be below, not above, the accompanying diagram; as things stand, the label “Simple basic strategy” seems to belong to paintings showing a complex basic strategy, and the label “Simple alternate strategy” appears to go with paintings showing a complex alternate strategy. No matter how many times I’ve looked at this opening, my eye still mis-allocates the paintings and their labels.
Perhaps the most important illustration in the book, Figure 35, presents graphically the differences so well described in prose among the four molt strategies. But the caption here fails to do justice to the ingenuity of Howell’s diagram, leaving the reader–at least this reader–uncertain whether some of the graphic details are intended to convey meaning or, and this seems less likely, are simply inconsistencies in design. For example, the caption informs us that a broken line distinguishes body feathers from flight feathers (an important distinction, given that in all but the simple basic strategy, body feathers in at least the first cycle are molted more often than remiges and rectrices); but what does it mean when that line becomes a solid line in the diagram? And does the pre-alternate molt under the complex alternate strategy in fact commence later and last longer than the homologous molt in birds employing a simple alternate strategy–as the diagram seems to depict? This is a tremendously useful diagram, but the caption should address, if only to deny, the significance of such small differences in the graphs.
Just as useful is the table occupying pages 26-28, a clear overview of the molt strategies observed in each family of North American birds. The rarest, and perhaps the oldest, is the simple basic strategy, in which birds molt directly from juvenile plumage to basic plumage, without a formative “immature” plumage in between; the commonest–exhibited by nearly all passerine families and a range of non-passerines, too–is the complex alternate strategy, in which young birds molt from juvenile plumage into an “extra” formative plumage, and birds of all ages undergo an almost always incomplete pre-alternate molt.
This table serves as a quick guide to the family chapter that follow, each of which begins with a short account of the family’s taxonomic affinities and general natural history. There follow concise but easily understandable descriptions of each molt, often including a fascinating question or two about apparent anomalies in a species’ or group’s molting behavior: why, for example, asks Howell, do skimmers have a pre-formative molt, which tends to be more typical of long-distance migrants? Howell’s answers to these questions, when he has them, are always cogent, and the cases where he can offer only speculation are precisely those where careful and observant birders and ornithologists could make a real contribution to our knowledge of molt.
Because the systematic section of the book remains at the relatively abstract level of family, birders tempted to look here for shortcuts to species-level identification may be disappointed. There are useful hints here and there, but the significance of this splendid book is far greater than helping us distinguish the eastern crows or the western empids. With his characteristic clarity, completeness, and good humor, Steve Howell has given the birding world an entree into one of the great mysteries of bird biology, and the time spent studying Molt–and molt–will be more than rewarded by the increased sophistication and enjoyment with which we will be able to look at even the commonest birds. Molt, says the author, “offers a fascinating window through which to appreciate how the lives of birds are built.” Many thanks to Steve Howell for opening that window to the rest of us.
Dunne: Bayshore Summer
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s as presumptuous as I hope it is premature for a reviewer to say that a writer as young and as prolific as Pete Dunne has attained his “mature style”: but I suspect that most readers will agree with me that Bayshore Summer, the second volume in the author’s planned seasonal quartet, is the best so far of the estimable and growing corpus of Dunne’s natural history writing.
Any book about a season brings with it its own chronological structure–Dunne begins at a Memorial Day gas station and ends with a Labor Day fishing trip–but there is a much deeper, much more significant series of symmetries here, too. Leaving aside a couple of the clever set pieces for which the author is justly famous (and by which he is, in too many readers’ minds, unjustly defined), Summer is neatly bookended by symmetrically placed chapters that inform and question each other; the book’s careful architecture invites the reader to think hard about the issues raised in it.
And they are important issues. This is not–notwithstanding constant references to the Delaware Bayshore’s rich birdlife–a bird book, but a book about the history and natural history of a landscape, a marshscape, that has been inhabited by humans for nearly as long as it has by Ospreys and Laughing Gulls. When I lived in central New Jersey in the 1980s, we thought of Cumberland County as an exotic wilderness, far off the beaten parkway path. But the bayshore is also home to people, many of them still pursuing traditional resource-based professions that are as endangered (and for many of the same reasons) as a wintering Loggerhead Shrike or a migrant Red Knot. Dunne treats the baymen with sympathy and respect, acknowledging their expertise borne of hundreds of years on the water and out in the spartina marshes, and pointing out again and again that no landscape can be saved without taking culture as much into account as nature.
Most telling of all is a pair of chapters at the center of the book focusing on young people’s connections to nature. In Chapter 6, “Party,” Dunne relates his encounter with a teenage boy and his father fishing from a party boat on Delaware Bay; grudgingly, the young man rates his experience a 4 out of 10, far lower on the scale than a day spent playing computer games. Compare this with the young angler’s 15-year-old counterpart in Chapter 4, putting up salt hay with his father (and a visiting natural history writer), his plans for the future consisting in “doin’ this…with my father.” There’s sentimentality in the contrast between the salt of the earth with his feet on the ground and the city kid with his head in the clouds, but there’s also an important message about our increasing remoteness from a natural world that increasingly needs our help.
Dunne concludes with a set of recommendations for providing that help, from development restrictions to ecotourism promotion, and, with equal eloquence, he identifies “the biological element that makes the region so colorfully unique”:
The people. Who have, for eight and ten and twelve generations, worked their changes upon and been themselves changed by the environment in which they live. Not as observers but as participants. Not as exploiters but as players in a wonderful, real-life drama, involving people and nature. All set on an extraordinary stage that might be approaching its final curtain call.
Overstated? Not in the least, as south Jersey comes to look more and more like north Jersey a generation or two ago; but the recognition that nature and culture, wildness and humans, must be thought of together can go a long ways towards helping us save both. Pete Dunne’s Bayshore Summer inspires us to do just that.
The New “Little Petersons”
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“Veteran birders will know how to use this book.”
True now, true when a variation on the sentence first introduced the standard-setting second edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s Eastern field guide. But unlike the situation in 1947, the new 2010 editions of the Eastern and the Western guides won’t be judged by the standards of “veterans who have watched birds for years.” That segment of the market–a market and a segment both virtually invented by the Peterson enterprise more than three quarters of a century ago–will stick to Sibley, Nat Geo, and above all Pyle; but the new “little Petersons,” along with the single-volume North American guide published two summers ago, could play an important role in the formation of new birders and casual birders.
What that means for the reviewer is that these books are to be judged not by their exhaustive completeness and unfailing accuracy but rather by their clarity and appeal. In important ways, that is a more demanding standard; and the stakes are certainly higher, since these editions are likely to be the point of entry for many of those who take them to hand.
As is no less than expected of a Peterson guide, these books pass the appeal test with flying colors (the pun unintended but greatly appreciated). Slightly larger than a “normal” Peterson or the little Sibleys, the books will fit handily into a big pocket or a small pack for those inclined to carry them afield (and many of those who use these guides will carry them afield). Range maps, detailed and up-to-the-minute accurate, thanks largely to Paul Lehman, face the plates and then are reproduced in even greater detail in an appendix.
The images on the plates are very large and bright, most–but puzzlingly not all–of the colors more or less true. It must be repeated that many of Peterson’s birds just don’t look like birds, somehow, but as matrices for the famous field-mark arrows they’re just fine. I do wish that the Aubudon’s Warbler female in the Eastern guide looked less like a yellow-throated Myrtle, and that the parulids and emberizids had always been granted their tails. All of the plates should have white backgrounds, too, instead of the occasional sickly green.
Where these books disappoint is in their clarity. It is absolutely essential that books for beginners, or books likely to wind up in the hands of beginners, be comprehensible and informative; the early Peterson guides remain almost unexcelled in this, with barely a misplaced word to confuse even the neoest of birding phytes. Peterson at his estimable best as a writer was capable of a linear single-mindedness that leads the reader effortlessly, successfully to wherever he wanted her to go: the 1947 guide remains one of the brightest teaching texts around, even as its sophistication–considerable in its day–has inevitably faded.
Some of that Petersonian clarity still shines through the text in these new editions, but just as in the single-volume guide published in 2008, it is not consistently a character of the new books’ design and content. Both the Eastern and the Western volumes adopt the latest taxonomic innovations; but where Roger Tory Peterson would certainly have had something to say about the re-assignment of Piranga, and would certainly have moved the plate of those “tanagers” to a position closer to their rather similar cardinalid cousins, the new books, both of them, leave the red tanagers separated by many pages from the cardinals, the only indication that something has changed a useless reference to the plate where, after long interruption, the family picks up again.
Taxonomy and classification, important in helping beginners (and more advanced birders, too) organize their thoughts, are in general a weak point in these volumes. The discussion of geographic variation in the books’ front matter, taken from the one-volume guide, remains confusing and confused; surely those responsible for the updated text understand the relationship between a species and its subspecies, between subspecies and subspecies groups, but it’s really an inexcusable mess as presented here. Subspecies and morphs are also confused in the accounts for Krider’s Hawk: while the new Western guide (following what appears to be current thought) identifies that pale Plains beauty as a white morph of borealis Red-tailed Hawk, the eastern guide identifies it as b o t h a morph and a separate subspecies.
English names are treated just as cavalierly: the captions to the plates for the scolopacids vary from “wader” to “sandpiper” to “snipe-like shorebird,” just as they did–misleadingly, confusingly, pointlessly–in the single-volume edition of 2008. Again, the new redactors had to know how to do this right; is doing it consistently wrong a mark of heedlessness or simply a lack of respect for the needs of thoughtful new birders, who are going to be left shaking their heads–perhaps even shelving their binoculars? These problems were pointed out in the reviews of the larger book, and to see them taken over into the smaller, regional volumes is a grave disappointment.
Just as serious, if perhaps less immediately noticeable, is an annoying tic in the texts. Again and again, the books inform the new birder of the existence of a problem–without offering any advice on how to solve it. Greater White-fronted Goose, we learn, might be confused with a domestic Graylag; but under neither species is there the least hint how to avoid that confusion. Snow and Ross’s Geese hybridize, but under neither species is there any indication how to recognize a possible hybrid. Female goldeneye are said to be identifiable by their wing pattern; but under neither species is there a clue about what precisely to look for. Empidonax differ, according to the introduction to the genus, in bill shape, tail length, and wing formula; but (especially in the Eastern guide) we are given virtually no guidance when trying to analyze a given bird on those criteria. Better to have kept silent than to promise, then to deny, a tidbit of knowledge.
A particularly egregious example is the Eastern guide’s treatment of the black corvids. At the bottom of the plate, drawings of the spread wings of Fish and American Crows are outfitted with arrows pointing to the slotted primaries of each. And the facing text? It tells us nothing to help the beginner understand what the differences are supposed to be. And worst of all, that facing page is half blank–space that could profitably and pleasingly have been used for a brief, simple discussion of the usefulness of wing formula, molt timing, and flight style in identifying the crows of the eastern US. Instead, we’re left with white paper and inscrutable images.
The latest incarnations of the Peterson guides are intended to be “not simply a commemoration but a useful, up-to-date resource.” They should be, and they could have been. But for all their attractiveness and convenience, these books are not the best choice for new or casual birders. Maybe the next editions will be.
