The ideal North American field guide Message on BirdChat 22 Sept. 2002, by John van der Woude

Recently I was on a private  birding trip to the USA (Colorado and Cape May) and I used three field guides for identification. On former trips I had always used the National Geographic Society guide (NGS) but now I had also brought two newer ones. These were Ken Kaufman's Focus Guide Birds of North America, and the well known Sibley guide (Audubon). I tried to find out which one of these three would be the best in the field for me. As a European it is with some hesitation that I will report on Birdchat about this experiment because after five birding trips to the USA I still consider my knowledge of the North American birds as rather superficial. But I can't remember to have seen a comparison between all these three field guides before.

For me, each field guide has its own advantages: - Kaufman's guide for its good ergonomics (easy to leaf through, and compact), for its apt and compact descriptions of anything that can help identifying a bird, for its often very lively photographs (digitally enhanced) with arrows to show the critical field marks, and for the very informative distribution maps; - NGS (3rd edition) for its familiar plates and the ample text; - the Sibley guide for the number of illustrations per species (many plumages, and flight profiles), for the outline of all species per family at the start of each family, and for giving not only arrows but also text next to the arrows (for the critical field marks).

Gradually I used the Sibley guide more and more, but for the not too difficult species I often used the Kaufman's guide because of its small size and its handy grip (both in contrast to the Sibley guide). The NGS guide was less in use, mainly (I think) because of its lack of arrows in the plates. Alas, not all illustrations (photos) in Kaufman's guide were good enough for me.

As none was really ideal for me I was thinking about what would be the ideal field guide for North America. At this moment, my reference for an ideal field guide is the Collins Birds of Europe (Mullarney, Svensson, Zetterström, Grant). It is compact, shows many illustrations per species (often half a dozen or more), has ample descriptions of all sorts of items that help in identification (also habitat and behavior), and shows arrows with small text annotations in the plates (for the critical field marks). To these four characteristics I would add two from the newest American guides: an illustrated outline of all species per family at the start of each family (like in the Sibley guide), and distribution maps that distinguish between more and less common occurrence (like in Kaufman's guide).

Maybe the NGS people can think about a fifth edition that considers all these six characteristics? ;-)