After two exciting days at a couple of the hottest spots around, I decided to duck the binocular-brandishing crowd today and try someplace new. I didn’t exactly close my eyes and point at the map, but I did settle on a green blotch in the atlas I’d never heard of, and so set off for Nutley’s Memorial Parkway.

It turned out to be exactly what I’d hoped for: a nice strip of trees and bushes along an urban watercourse, and I had it all to myself until the earliest of the dog walkers and the promptest of the morning joggers showed up. And there were birds: half a dozen species of warblers, both eastern orioles, and my first Swainson’s Thrush of the spring. I was impressed to see a pair of Northern Rough-winged Swallows investigating a mossy cavern in the bank of the creek.

Of all the new things I saw, this is the one that brought me up short.

Look at that last name listed among the Trustees. I was birding hallowed ground.

And here’s what the new, sixth edition of the National Geographic Field Guide has to say:

…intense searching subsequently [after the April 2005 announcement] has yet to produce more documentation, [a circumstance] seemingly not possible in an age when most rarities discovered are photographed and those images are posted on the Internet the same day…. sightings that lack provable evidence more likely represent wishful thinking.

The seventh edition will see that fine bird relegated to the appendix shared by Eskimo Curlew, Bachman’s Warbler, and Labrador Duck.

Oh, to have been born 150 years earlier! No, never mind.

My advice: buy it!

What Alexander Wilson, William Cooper, and James Trudeau have in common is that each provides the eponym for a bird first described from a New Jersey specimen.

Wilson gets a plover and a warbler. Cooper gets a hawk. And Trudeau, said by Audubon to have come from Louisiana (the sources make no mention of any banjo on his knee), is memorialized in the English and scientific names of a tern.

Trudeau’s Tern, now also known as Snowy-crowned Tern, presents a unique case in the history of North American ornithology. Audubon, in his description of the species in the Ornithological Biography, says that his “much esteemed and talented friend” had collected the bird he painted from a group of a few birds found at Great Egg Harbor, now in Atlantic County. Thus, the type locality for the species is Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey.

But here’s where it gets strange. The AOU Check-list Committee, after the species had been included for well over a century in the authentic avifauna of North America, removed it in the Seventh Edition to the appendix of “Species reported from the A.O.U. check-list area with insufficient evidence for placement on the main list.” As a result, Sterna trudeaui is cited from a type locality in North America–but not admitted to the North American list, thanks to doubts about the bird’s provenance.

I don’t know that there is a parallel case anywhere in the history of ornithological nomenclature.  Can you think of one?

Thanks to Ted and to Jennifer.

For now, though, what I’m finding fascinating is the rare opportunity to look at birding from the outside, as critics and reviewers explain the phenomenon to their non-birding readers. So here’s what we apparently look like to “normal” people:

Bird-watching seems like a harmless hobby, and I’ve penciled it into the calendar for my golden years. - Joe Williams

For most of the general population the only thing more boring than birding itself is watching other people do it. - Robert Levin

True, birding may be a solitary, insular pursuit, only important to those who enjoy its meek geek attributes. – Bill Gibron

Bird-watching — or birding, as practitioners prefer to call it — makes for a stupefyingly boring movie. – Rene Rodriguez

Maybe it’s impossible to make anything really interesting, on a subject that is itself so inherently uninteresting. - Joshua Tyler

Aside from an international staring contest and the World Series of Texting, there aren’t many challenges less suited for a movie than competitive bird watching. – Matt Pais

People with plenty of disposable income travel to locales on a moment’s notice whenever they hear of an unusual or uncommon species that has decided to land on a branch or a rock or a beach …. setting up tripods in garbage dumps, hunkering down for long hours in the woods and making silly sounds with one’s lips. – Teddy Durgin

Competitive birding is only for the leisure class or for young people sponsored by their rich, indulgent parents. - James Verniere

A long, slightly dull slog …. But then, that’s birding for you. – Stephen Whitty

An asinine sort-of sport. – Dustin Putman

I can remember to the day learning to identify this bird–a White-rumped Sandpiper, photographed yesterday at Sandy Hook. It was at a shorebird workshop in Nebraska in the 1970s, conducted by Mary Tremaine, and it was a real eye-opener: Dr. Tremaine gave us all mimeographed pages introducing a strange and new way to identify shorebirds, using not plumage characters but shape and structure. She even produced a dichotomous key, with such odd choices as “More bird behind legs” and “More bird ahead of legs.”

All very conventional nowadays, though we have more precise, less impressionistic ways of talking about wing projection and such. But remember: this was thirty years before The Shorebird Guide, twenty years before The New Approach, nearly a decade before the National Geographic Guide. Mary Tremaine was way, way ahead of her time, and I’ve often regretted not getting to spend more time at her figurative feet when I was a young birder.

As near as I can tell, she is quite forgotten today, a common enough fate for not-quite-famous birders who lived and died in a pre-internet age. Google turns up the odd citation here and there, but nowhere, so far as I know, did she publish any sustained work on identification techniques. If she had, we’d be talking about her today as a pioneer in modern birding.

A sad observation, even sadder if we recognize these as the words of Roger Tory Peterson, written nearly sixty years ago.

In the first days of their great Wild America trip, Peterson and James Fisher didn’t even bother stopping on the New Jersey coast, zipping right past what are today some of eastern North America’s most famous birding sites as they pushed on to Washington and points south.

Island Beach is still a gem, and Alison and I had a great time this morning on the beaches and on the salt marshes that have long made this still pristine site one of our favorites.

We arrived at sunrise, the white sandy beach quiet but for the patter of little Sanderling feet and the bleating of Royal Terns. Fresh juvenile gulls were piled up in little bands at the dune edge, among them gorgeously crisp Great Black-backed Gulls like this one.

The thickets Peterson praised so highly are often good for passerine migrants in the fall. This morning’s crop was mostly Gray Catbirds, dozens of them on the roads and no doubt many hundreds in the dune vegetation. There were also scattered Brown Thrashers and cheeky Eastern Towhees, but the skies belonged to Eastern Kingbirds, dancing on the tips of their wings in the dim light of dawn.

Soon enough it was time to meet the kayaking birders for an excursion out onto the flats and marshes of the bay.

It was obvious from shore that there were lots of birds on the sand bared by the low tide. As we got closer to the Sedge Islands, we got a clearer sense of the flocks’ diversity.

Royal Tern was the most abundant tern, but we also had decent numbers of Common Terns, a few Forster’s Terns, three or four Caspian Terns, and a single Black Tern. Most of the gulls were Laughing Gulls, with smaller numbers of Great Black-backed and Herring Gulls, including more of those snazzy juveniles.

Three Brown Pelicans floated past, and there were plenty of loafing Double-crested Cormorants. The heron show was better even than we’d hoped, with Great Blue, Great Egret, Snowy Egret, Little Blue, a heartening count of seven Tricolored, and both Yellow-crowned and Black-crowned Night-Herons in the course of the morning; perhaps the biggest surprise was a single adult Green Heron flushed from the spartina, a slightly unusual place for that retiring freshwater species.

What most of us were there for, of course, was shorebirds, and we did well in that department, too.

Black-bellied and Semipalmated Plovers were the most abundant, sharing the mud with another ten species, from American Oystercatchers to Ruddy Turnstones. Skyler had paddled out with a scope, so everyone got good looks at such beauties as Short-billed Dowitcher and Least Sandpiper.

By the time we shoved off from the sandbar, the tide had turned. We took advantage of it to explore some of the smaller channels in the cordgrass marsh, passing the many Ospreys and a fine, large Peregrine Falcon along the way.

It impressed me again, as it had on my only other kayak birding trip (in Virginia, ten years ago!), how easy it was in the boat to get close to otherwise spooky birds. That Peregrine Falcon allowed half a dozen kayaks to float almost right up to her low perch, and even such wary lookouts as Greater Yellowlegs stalked the salt pannes without concern as we paddled past.

Just as we reached the outermost point of our route, the gray skies became wet skies, and our return to the launching site was fast and as direct as we could make it. But Alison and I have already decided to do this again. Maybe we’ll see some of you there!

Birders and bookers are horrified now, but if you think about it, there must have been thousands, tens of thousands of such plates discarded in the nineteenth century. Some were no doubt wiped clean and reused for other engravings; some certainly ended up as steamship fittings and pennies and plumbing. Most such recycling, I’m sure, caused no one second thoughts, but in 1865, John Cassin just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Early that year, Cassin wrote to Philip Sclater from Philadelphia that

the Academy of Natural Sciences had presented to it, some thirty years since, the engraved copper-plates of Vieillot’s ‘Oiseaux de l’Amérique Septentrionale’ and of Audebert and Vieillot’s ‘Oiseaux Dorés’…. I have been authorized to sell them at the price here of refuse or old copper…. I write to you in relation to them, hoping that, if a notice is inserted in the ‘Ibis’, a purchaser may possibly be found, who will preserve them, or to whom they may be useful.

[Ibis 7.1 (1865): 116]

I don’t know whether Cassin ever found such a purchaser–and the mere fact that the note appeared in the Ibis tells us that he hadn’t found one in Sclater.

“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.