Laura Erickson's For the Birds

During the Christmas season, a lot of people ask me for gift ideas for the birdwatchers on their lists. The bird book section of bookstores is growing at an enormous rate thanks to the surge in popularity of birds, so there are many to choose from.

For a basic field guide for the experienced birder, the National Geographic Field Guide is a great choice. This one was just revised in a Fourth Edition. The changes weren’t all that dramatic, and right now the American Birding Association is selling the third edition, which isn’t much different from the fourth, for only $10.50 on their website, so if you’re looking for a last minute, inexpensive gift, you might check there. For beginning birders I really like Kenn Kaufman’s Focus Guide. It’s the smallest complete field guide, and unlike all the other guides l recommend, this one uses photographs. But Kaufman didn’t just lay out two or three rectangular photos on a page–he digitally lifts each bird out of the photo, and so can have several species, in several plumages each, on a single page as the drawing field guides do. He also uses the distinctive lines pointing to important field marks that was started by Roger Tory Peterson.

But for people looking for a different kind of book, the new kid on the block is Sibley’ s Birding Basics—a small, stocking-stuffer sized book that won’t identify individual birds, but gives a lot of grounding in the basic skills a birder should have. Written and illustrated by David Sibley, it’s authoritative, and is chock full of information to make any birding experience richer.

You can tell Sibley is an artist by how focused he is on watching birds—their behavior but especially their plumage. Reading this book gave me a better sense of just how an artist looks at a bird, seeing the whole thing, but also noticing many tiny details that could be missed even when the bird sticks around a long time if you’re not thinking about it. He opens the book, “One of the biggest differences between the expert birder and the novice is that the expert has spent years training to see details. The beginner must literally learn how to see them.”

The book is written to help you find birds more easily, and then what to look at once you find a bird. A lot of field guides show a diagram of a bird, pointing out the various areas of the body, but Sibley goes beyond this to show diagrams of a variety of different kinds of birds side by side so you can see how, say, the scapulars differ between a hawk and a shorebird. He also shows various individual feathers and points out where on the body they fit.

David Allen Sibley is a first-rate artist as well as master birder , and he ‘ s done a splendid job. Sibley’s Birding Basics is a tiny but essential book that good birders will consult now and then and read over every few years, and may well become for birders what E.B. White’s The Elements of Style is for writers.