Archive for Book Reviews
Birding the Civil War with Jon Dunn
Posted by: | CommentsNow this is cool.
Tours like this, where natural history informs human history, really are birding for grown-ups!
Robinson, Birding for Everyone
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the most cherished myths of our pastime is the belief that “anyone can do it,” that birding is democratically open to everyone, from plumbers to professors, from teenagers to dowagers. But look around next time you’re in the field in the US or Canada: as proudly various as your group may be, chances are scandalously good that everybody’s white.
As John Robinson’s new book makes clear, it matters that our Black or Hispanic or Asian birding friends make up such a vanishingly small percentage of birding hobbyists; with those erstwhile minorities fast becoming the majority of Americans, the attitudes and ideas of non-white communities are likely to determine our conservation policy for the foreseeable future, and birding has historically been an important entree to respect for the wider natural world.
Birding for Everyone strikes the reader as at first a bit miscellaneous. The eclecticism of the first chapters results from the book’s trebled audience: “mainstream” white birders who would like to share their hobby with all their friends; the birding industry; and people of color who want to pursue an interest in nature and the outdoors. Following a gracious and beautifully written Foreword by Kenn Kaufman, Robinson’s first chapter is an autobiographical sketch neatly exemplifying the importance of an early mentor to his development as a birder–an inspiration to “mainstream” birders to share their talents.
Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 are more obviously directed to the tentative beginner. These I found the least satisfactory of the book’s ten chapters, and I have some serious doubts about how encouraging they will be to, say, a young urban teenager. Birding can be practiced without any sort of “hardwara” or “software,” and Robinson’s discussions of binoculars, spotting scopes, tripods, digiscoping rigs, cd-roms, print resources, and subscriptions to BNA Online are simply out of place in a book that wants to make the new birder’s initiation as painless and as inviting as possible. The vaguely described “secrets” of bird identification shared in Chapter 5 are far less useful than the introduction to any of the standard field guides.
I would much rather have seen the space taken up by these chapters devoted instead to some rubrics that I think Robinson treats too superficially. Developing an interest in birds, what birders want, and what good comes of birding, are all topics that get a mere page or two here, but all of critical interest to birding organizations, the birding industry, and birders of any color. I know, from a fascinating few conversations with the author, that Robinson has deep and novel thoughts about these matters, and I would have loved to read more about them here.
Chapter 7 presents the data behind the arguments Robinson tenders in the remainder of the book. By comparing surveys of birders and non-birders from the African-American community with surveys of ABA members and of the US population in general, Robinson reveals some startling statistics. Three particularly long-lived white birders claimed to have met an African American in the field an average of once every twenty-two years–a figure that sounds outlandish but isn’t far off from my own experience. The precise numbers vary, of course, from survey to survey: Robinson found that 28% of his (very small) sample of African Americans “participated” in birding, a number that seems to me still impossibly high; a USF&WS survey produced a more plausibly discouraging figure of 6%.
Why are African Americans so badly underrepresented? (Robinson cites various surveys recording white “participation” rates as high as 48%–clearly badly overstated, but still 8 times the figure for African Americans). Robinson dwells, correctly in my view, on the absence of inspiring mentor figures in the community. He argues that exposure to a positive birding role model would almost certainly vitiate the two most frequent explanations offered by African Americans for their non-participation: a lack of time, and a lack of interest. Time and engagement, says Robinson, can always be found, whatever one’s personal or financial circumstances, if there is a social network supporting an activity; potential natural history enthusiasts need a chance to try it out, a chance that is lacking in communities without birding mentors.
These are, as Robinson’s chapter title points out, “hard facts” indeed. But what can be done about them? Wisely and persuasively, Robinson lets the recommendations for action emerge from the words of his survey subjects, distilling from their thoughtful comments a list of five “activity areas” where efforts should be concentrated.
Significantly, the first of those points of contact is the family. My guess is that for every white birder whose parent or sibling introduced her to the sport, there are 50 who found their impetus and first mentors in the larger community. Because “minority” communities don’t offer as rich a pool of potential birding mentors, and because (it might be argued) the family remains on the whole a more influential setting in those communities, education and exposure efforts must include multiple generations. This is perhaps the most important lesson Robinson offers, one that I hope is taken firmly to heart in cities like Tucson and Nogales.
Schools and community institutions are only slightly less important as points of birding delivery; as Paul Baicich’s eloquent concluding comments note, for many generations schoolteachers played the role of “imbuer,” providing both inspiration and focus for their pupils’ natural historical interests. Park centers, churches, and youth clubs should join the schools in teaching natural history as an access to ecological understanding.
Robinson’s respondents also point to the importance of advertising and public service announcements. Like it or not (I don’t much), the media create our expectations of the appropriate, and I almost never see ads featuring adult birders of any color but pale (have you noticed that attempts at inclusiveness seem always to feature cute children, driving home the message that the grown-up world, the “real” world, is one of division?).
Most importantly, the wider birding community needs to make a conscious effort to support and to promote “minority” birders who can serve as mentors in their own communities. Just how to do this effectively, sensitively, and respectfully is a question Robinson leaves explicitly unanswered here, preferring to let the reader find suggestions in the series of interviews with half a dozen Hispanic, African American, and Asian birding stars. Now here’s some real inspiration, and these pages should be required reading for anyone interested in making birding available to all of us.
There remains for me one nagging fear, subtly articulated by Paul Baicich in his concluding comment to the book. What if birding as we know it is so completely culturally contingent that it can’t be spread to other communities? What if our attempts to do so constitute a neocolonialist imposition of white, European values on cultures whose own views of the outside world are irreconcilable with those of the western Enlightenment? Robinson largely decines to address this critical question. But I for one am willing to give up birding as we know it if it means engaging all Americans in the fight to save the wild patrimony that is, as Robinson’s title reminds us, “for everyone.”
The Peterson Centennial II: Two Lives
Posted by: | CommentsI didn’t know Roger Peterson, and the closest I can recall having come to meeting The Great Man was a damp morning in Princeton, when there were so many reporters and television cameras in the Institute Woods that we turned around in a righteous huff and went elsewhere.
Or rather: Of course I know Roger Tory Peterson. I’ve known him since my first birdbook (the 1961 Western, a longitudinal misunderstanding on my part ), and I’ve got to know him better and better over the years, obsessively obsessing over the field guides, the prose books, the interviews, the prefaces and forewords, the never-ending flow of words from a man I never met. Over the decades I’ve deduced–or perhaps I’ve constructed–a lifesize picture of Peterson and his life; I’m good at such things, by temperament and by training, and I’m sure that broad swaths of that portrait are as accurate as they are plausible. And I’m sure that even broader swaths are neither.
I remember the eagerness with which I seized on the Devlin and Naismith “biography,” and I remember the disgust with which I put it down: even at 13 I smelled that mouldering whiff of hagiography (remember the scurrilous story of the bloodied dustjacket?). Not the television interviews, not the coffee-table albums of paintings and photos, not the increasingly repetitious essays and forewords gave me what I really wanted–a check on the fantasy vita I’d created, a little historical truth against which to measure years of surmise and suspicion.
As the Peterson centennial approached, two new experiments in biography appeared: the one a “lite” collection of anecdotes, the other a well-researched and solidly written piece of historiography. To my surprise, I’ve enjoyed both, and each has forced me to adjust certain components of my image of Peterson, generally in favor of the man; but both together have rather confirmed a long-held suspicion: that Peterson reached his estimable peak early, and that apart from the wonder that was the 1947 Field Guide, there was a great deal of frustration in Peterson’s efforts.
I don’t remember now just why I was so ready to dislike Elizabeth Rosenthal’s Birdwatcher, but only when Susan Drennan told me that she had been involved in the refereeing of the manuscript did I find myself moved to pick the book up. And I’m glad I did; it’s a delightful read, a gracefully written compilation of stories and anecdotes largely unburdened by argument. Rosenthal relies heavily on long quotes from interviews conducted with Peterson’s family, friends, and acolytes; for the most part, these are neatly integrated into her larger text, with only the occasional editorial officiousness (my favorite: “stable chemicals” is emended to “stable [of] chemicals”!).
I don’t mean at all to suggest that the book is aimless or unstructured. It begins with Peterson’s birth and ends with his death; in between we learn about his fortes and his flaws, his childish relationships with women and his profound friendship with his polar opposite, James Fisher. We encounter a hopelessly abstracted and slightly creepy Peterson–voiding his bladder in public, “rating” strange women on train platforms–and a gloomy, moody Peterson whose fear of age and death took him to the plastic surgeon more than once. More fascinating, perhaps, are the portraits Rosenthal sketches of many of Peterson’s associates, friends, and partners, their names familiar to birders from decades of printed acknowledgments but their lives and personalities until now pretty much lost. The three wives in particular gain dimension in Rosenthal’s accounts; Barbara Peterson turns out–as any careful reader of Wild America must have guessed–to be strong and engaging and intelligent (not to mention long-suffering), to my mind at least as rewarding a subject for biography as her famous husband. Virginia Peterson, on the other hand, comes off as the Lady Macbeth she’d long been rumored to be; at times her depiction descends almost to caricature, and I find myself wondering whether the picture painted here is entirely fair–especially given the occasional positive comment about her from the lips and pens of Peterson’s later acolytes. The first wife, Mildred Peterson, remains a relative mystery. Rosenthal is able to provide some details about her family and background–distinguished and privileged, respectively–but this great-great…niece of George Washington disappears from the biography as surely as she seems to have disappeared from her ex-husband’s life, surfacing only briefly on her accidental death many years later.
To the extent that Birdwatcher presents an argument, it is found in the central 100 pages of the book, where Rosenthal treats Peterson’s conservation activities in, especially, the 1960s, identifying him as among the prima mobilia of a burgeoning world-wide environmental movement. Peterson’s own early work, conducted for the US Army in the 1940s, on the effects of pesticides was incidental and inconclusive, but he was an early and influential supporter of Rachel Carlson in her search for a publisher for Silent Spring; the Petersons also provided support and assistance to researchers seeking the causes of the decline of the Osprey in coastal Connecticut. Peterson’s visit with Guy Mountfort to the wild Doñana raised worldwide awareness of the threats to one of Europe’s most important landscapes, ultimately resulting in its preservation.
These are great accomplishments, but Rosenthal’s accounts of Peterson’s role in them are somewhat undermined by comments she reproduces from others involved: the recurring remarks that Peterson was always willing to lend his name to a worthy cause begin to sound rather like back-handed compliments. I have no reason at all to doubt Rosenthal in this matter, but especially given those comments, I would like to have seen in the supporting documentation for this section more citations to primary archival materials than to popular articles from Peterson’s own pen. My suspicion remains that Peterson’s active and direct contributions to conservation may be a little overstated here, even as his influence–the influence of his field guides–even now on many of the leaders of the environmental movement can hardly be exaggerated.
The field guides, both those Peterson created and those he edited, weighed heavily on him in the last decades of his life. Rosenthal’s final chapters recount an unending conflict between what he considered the responsibility to update the guides and the desire to indulge himself in photography and travel. For the reader, those stories are made the more melancholy by our knowledge–shared, and forcefully expressed, by some of Peterson’s friends as early as 1980–that however strenuous his efforts, the bird guides had been rendered largely obsolete, and that from many birders’ perspectives, Peterson was honoring an imaginary obligation in devoting so much of his time to them. Saddest of all is the notion, given voice repeatedly in the last three decades of Peterson’s life, that the field guide work was keeping him from pursuing his studio painting, a complaint Rosenthal reports without comment or irony.
The tension the older Peterson experienced between his art, his field guides, and his indulgences is at the center of Doug Carlson’s fine Roger Tory Peterson: A Biography. Folk wisdom to the contrary, you can tell a book by its cover, and where Rosenthal’s shows the young Peterson at the top of his game, confidently and slightly ridiculously assuming the pose of Goethe in the Campagna, Carlson’s dust jacket depicts Peterson not long before his death, eyes empty, smile vague, dwarfed by the longest of long lenses. No field guides, no paint brushes, no birds in sight–just an old man pondering his legacy.
I’ll review Doug Carlson’s book soon in a final entry commemorating the Peterson centennial.
Birds of the World: Recommended English Names
Posted by: | CommentsI’m eager to get home and browse through the newly revised IOC Recommended English Names. This was an enormously fascinating–and fascinatingly enormous–project from the very beginning, and over the, what, two years now since the list’s appearance, I’ve found myself using it nearly every day, often in the form of the downloadable concordance of the IOC names and those used in the badly flawed sixth edition of Clements. This is an essential resource for all “world birders,” of course, but surprisingly helpful to the rest of us, too.
According to the announcement, the changes to this Version 1.7 include incorporation of the taxonomic shifts in the latest AOU Supplement and alteration of some 19 English species names (including the restoration of the time-honored “Long-tailed Tit,” olim Long-tailed Bushtit).
The Peterson Centennial I
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A hundred years ago tomorrow, Roger Tory Peterson was born in Jamestown, New York. Houghton Mifflin is marking the centennial of one of its most valuable authors with the publication of a new Field Guide, fusing in one handsome, generously formatted volume the old eastern, western, and Texas guides. The new book will please and instruct most of those who use it, and destined for bestsellerdom, it will ensure the seaworthiness of the Peterson juggernaut for another generation at least.
Those birders likely to use this guide will rely in the first instance on the plates. I’ll leave to others a full analysis of the travels and traditions of the paintings included here, but will note that most are, unfortunately, from the editions letzter Hand of the eastern and western books. I, for one, miss the brilliant little smudges illustrating Peterson’s earliest guides, and I wish that the editorial team had risked the worthy experiment of introducing their startling eloquence to a generation that has learned to think of Peterson not as an outstanding illustrator but as a poor painter. A number of Peterson’s images have been digitally corrected under the supervision of Michael O’Brien; O’Brien also contributes new paintings of species not included in earlier editions of the guides and supplementary images of some taxa, such as jaegers, originally depicted only in flight.
The familiar Petersonian pointers draw the user’s attention to each species’ field marks. In this version, the designer’s quiver bristles with arrows of widely different lengths, making plates where they are mixed look poorly planned; arrows are not consistently placed, either, making the user wonder, for example, why the leg color of Stilt Sandpiper should be marked at the “ankle” and that of Wilson’s Phalarope at the toes. In my review copy, at least, the arrows are thicker, heavier, and blacker than in earlier editions, and intrude badly on some figures: look at the face of the lower Philadelphia Vireo, for instance, whose (badly painted) dark lore nearly merges with the clunky head of the arrow pointing it out.
The paintings themselves are large and bright, crisply reproduced and generally pleasing to the eye. This guide’s new format allows the images to be reproduced some 20% larger than in its most recent predecessors. The effect is frequently stunning for those used to the small images in, say, the “big Sibley” or even the National Geographic guide–and almost literally stunning for those of us who grew up with the 1947 Peterson. Paradoxically, in a few cases (the Calidris sandpipers, most notably), the superior size of the images reveals their disappointing blandness, as the eye seeks feather details that just aren’t there; this seems to me a missed opportunity for enhancement, digital or analogue.
As they have in Peterson bird guides since 1980, the plates in this new volume share the opening with the corresponding species accounts. Notoriously, the facing-page format reduces the space available to the text, and some pages that have to squeeze in several species run dangerously close to the bottom edge; other modern field guides have dealt with this problem by slightly reducing the print size (as in NatGeo) or by making brilliant use of captions (as in big Sibley) or both (as in Mullarney/Svensson/Zetterstrom/Grant). No such effort to pack information in is apparent here; indeed, there are vast white spaces where the text apparently runs out of things to say, even about such challenging groups as gulls, gadfly petrels, and rails. The two text pages devoted to the skuas and jaegers are fully half blank–surely one or the other member of the editorial team could have filled those creamy acres with a simple essay introducing the techniques that many birders (not, I hasten to add, those of us who grew up on the Great Plains and live in the desert southwest) now use to identify these difficult birds.
The identification material we are given in the texts is generally accurate and helpful, likely to satisfy most of the time most of those who reach for this guide. A quick scan finds less new information than old resignation: female Archilochus hummingbirds, for example, are simply “very difficult to separate.” To be fair, the treatment of the gulls here is more extensive than in any previous incarnation of the Peterson guides, and the fall parulids are no longer “confusing,” a discouraging label they were forced to bear for 75 years. Ambitious users of the guide will find occasional references to more thorough identification guides, too, making it easier for them to take the next step to sophistication if they wish.
While most of the text is hippocratically harmless, there are a few passages that may mislead the user, especially in matters of taxonomy. The words “wader” and “shorebird” are, or should be, synonymous, the former more frequent in European usage, the other current in North America, as the general introduction to the families concerned notes; but the headers to the plates and the separate family introductions switch back and forth without motivation, and in one case seem to draw a distinction between “snipelike waders” and “sandpipers.” The beginning birder can be forgiven her confusion on trying to tease these sloppily applied terms apart.
More seriously and more pervasively, the new guide is hopelessly muddled in its approach to geographic variation. This is sadly ironic, of course, as the 1947 Peterson remains (alongside Pyle) perhaps the best source for information on the identification of subspecies in North America. The new guide reveals both its eastern bias and a lack of taxonomic awareness when it labels the Song Sparrows of the east “typical”; they are no more “typical” than any other subspecies or subspecies group of that species.
The Introduction’s brief discussion of the subspecies concept is equally inaccurate. It is nonsensical to write that “When the distinct geographic forms of a species reach a point when [sic, for: the point that] the population is dominated by individuals that are recognizably different from typical individuals of the ‘parent’ species, the local group is formally designated a subspecies of the parent species.” Members of a subspecies differ consistently from members of other subspecies of the same species, not from “typical” individuals of the species. The same illogic renders incomprehensible this sentence: “Often a subspecific group is so distinct from the parent species that several members can be easily recognized in the field….” Huh? Subspecies and subspecies groups are by definition identical to and part of the parent species that they make up. (And I have no idea what “several members” is supposed to mean here: several “members” of “a subspecific group”? several “members” of “the parent species”?) This is poor thinking clouded by a weird Platonic notion of what constitutes a species, and Roger Tory Peterson would roll in his grave to hear such nonsense imputed to him.
Apart from such goofs, the language of the texts in the new guide is noticeably less lively than in earlier editions. Peterson was never much of a stylist, at his best attaining a sort of even-toned weekly-reader clarity; but I wish that the editorial team responsible for this new edition had retained the occasional bits of humor and poetry that flash through the earlier guides. In 1947, Lincoln’s Sparrow was “a skulker, ‘afraid of its own shadow’,” and displaying Common Nighthawks could be seen “zooming up sharply … with a sudden deep whir that sounds like the well-known ‘Bronx cheer’.” Sixty-one years later, the charm of the birds is no longer reflected in the charm of the language; Lincoln’s Sparrow is now simply and pleonastically a “somewhat skulking species [that] prefers to be near cover,” and Common Nighthawks have learned their company manners. At least Prothonotary Warbler is still “a golden bird of the wooded swamps”!
If the new guide disappoints in some respects, the large-scale maps–gathered in the back of the book and reproduced as thumbnails in the species accounts–are a great and greatly appreciated improvement. Created by Paul Lehman, the large and clearly visible maps are both precise and accurate; the few quibbles one could raise are matters of degree, not of fact. American Black Ducks, for example, are probably too rare nowadays in southeast Nebraska to merit mapping. Conversely, the range of White-winged Dove across the continent could have been painted much more lavishly. Telegraphic notes on the maps indicate vagrancy patterns for many species; while completeness would be an unrealizable goal, there are occasional instances where records worth mentioning are passed over in silence: the vagrant ranges of White-eared Hummingbird and Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, for instance, are understated here. But few are the questions that these laudable maps do not answer, and authoritatively; I am especially pleased to see many species’ ranges in northern Mexico and the Caribbean limned with the same care given their distribution in the US and Canada.
With the publication of this new single-volume guide, the Peterson legacy is assured. And now it’s up to a new generation of birders to decide whether that legacy is a living one, or merely a tribute to the book that in some ways started it all.
