Buying a Field Guide

When you start birding it's mostly about being outside and seeing what's around you. At some point, a birder will find themselves wondering species they're seeing — they might recognize a robin, but what is that yellow bird over there?

That's where the field guide comes in handy. it's a collection of birds with the information you need to compare with what you're seeing out and come up with it's species identity.

There are many many many field guides out there. You can, for instance, find ones with every bird in the United States (or even North America), but for most birders, getting one with some location specialization can make searching easier. You can also find guides specific to certain types of birds, like Sparrows or Warblers, but for a newer birder, getting a field guide for their birding region is a better first guide.

The most commonly recommended guides have traditionally been the Sibley Field Guides, which are broken down into Eastern and Western editions, both sized to fix in a jacket pocket if you want it in the field. There's also a larger combined edition useful for studying inside but I wouldn't carry it outside while birding.

These are all guides that show birds via illustrations. there's a second style of guide that uses photographs. The National Audubon guides, both Eastern and Western are good examples of these. Another good one, which covers all of North America, is by National Geographic.

Drawings? or Photos?

Do you want a guide that uses photos, or one that uses drawings? It is honestly a personal choice, and one you should experiment with. A common thought among birders is that newer birders are better with the photographs, where more advanced birders prefer illustrations.

I prefer photographs and always have, but I think my work as a bird photographer influences that. I will almost always pick up a photography-based guide first, but I'll shift over to an illustration one while working through a complicated identification. I think in general the illustration books do a better job of showing off female and immature birds than most photo guides as well, which as you mature as a birder will become more of a challenge you'll want to solve.

What makes for a good field guide?

There are a few types of data I expect to see in a field guide, and a few things I require for me to want to use it. Here are some of the things I use to judge the quality of a guide when considering adding it to my collection.

First, it needs to contain the birds a birder might see in a location that the guide covers. It also needs to NOT contain birds that aren't going to be found there. This is actually a complicated set of decisions to make by the guide editor, and to me, it helps me see how much work they put into the book. In general, though, I think a guide needs to have ABA rarity codes 1, 2, and 3 (common to rare) and exclude ABA rarity codes 5 (accidental) and six (not found). How birds recorded with code 4 (casual, aka seen less than annually) are handled is where I think the judgement decisions are hardest but in general I'd exclude most of them.

The guides need good illustrations and/or photos, and should try to show off the variety of plumages and individuals. Where some guides fall short is with female birds, and with many more or them, immature/juvenile birds are missing. This can really complicate your attempts at an ID, especially during breeding season when there are newly fledged birds everywhere and none of them are wearing the plumage they'll grow into as adults.

Good range maps are essential tools for helping you understand whether a bird you're looking at in the guide would be found where you are at the time of year you're birding. Some birds are around all year, but many will only be found in a place some of the time, or as they pass through during migration. A good guide helps make the time of their visiting clear.

Something you won't get with paper books are bird calls and sounds, but the electronic guides now available for smartphones and tablets all have these (see next section). Use of recordings in the field has to be done with discretion, but can be a useful tool both for convincing birds to come into sight and to help you compare what you're hearing with what the known calls of a species are. See The Proper Use of Playback in Birding by David Sibley for some good thoughts on playback in the field.

One aspect some field guides have is suggestions about similar species alternatives, so you can compare those as well to see if one is a better fit.

Is it easy to find the birds? Most paper guides are ordered taxonomically, which is a hierarchichal approach to sorting birds that are related to each other (see The eBird Taxonomy for more details. Some of the electronic guides offer alphabetical sorting as well, although I rarely use that.

Should you buy a book at all?

I still find the paper books quite useful, but to be honest, I never take one out in the field any more. They have been relegated to my home library for when I'm researching something.

That's because there are really good versions of field guides available for your smartphone, both on IOS and Android. I've come to use those exclusively while I'm out and about. The guide I use most often is iBird Pro Guide to Birds by the Mitch Waite Group (IOS).

This guide has both illustrations and photos, which is why I like it; I can compare both in the same app. The app, unlike paper books, also comes with songs and calls for a species you can play and listen to, or play back to an area to see if birds react to it.

In some ways iBird Pro is a mixed bag. I don't like the illustrations as much as Sibley's, but the photos make up for it. That said, though, iBird can be quite weak on female and especially weak with immature/juvenile photos, and it's hit and miss with some of the regional plumage variations. I once almost made a rather notable mistake because of this when I ran into a group of vultures on a dead animal and one of them had a black head -- thinking maybe I had found a Black Vulture in among the Turkey Vultures. In discussing this with a couple of other birders, they set me straight -- immature Turkey Vultures don't have the red head, and iBird Pro had no pictures of non-adults to compare against. A quick look at the illustrations in the Sibley guide set me straight on this one, which is in a way a suggestion that multiple guides is never a bad idea -- in reality, each one has strengths and weaknesses and they can work well together to fill in the gaps in the others.

That's why I carry a second app on my phone and tablet, and that's the Sibley Guide. It is an online version of the paper guide, which makes it a really good and strong guide to have handy on your phone. It is illustration based, and doesn't have photos to refer to, and it doesn't have listings for similar species, but any criticisms I have about this guide are very minor -- except I prefer ID by photo. But it's still a critical piece of my ID work and I carry it on my phone at all times.

One nice thing about the guide apps is the ability to tell them where you are, and they do a nice job of limiting the species they show you to that locality. It can be a nice help in reducing the options for which species to look at while trying to figure out an ID.

Online guides

A bird resource I find I'm using more and more, and causing me to use my paper book library less over time, is the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's online guide All About Birds. It is a photo-based guide, with generally good selections of images including female and juvenile, and includes sound recordings. Their summaries about each species are quite good, and I generally find their range maps are some of the most up to date, which doesn't surprise me given their affiliation with eBird. When I'm at home, I almost always turn here first. When I'm out in the field, I'll still use the apps first because I'm not always in a place with cell phone coverage to load a web page.

What to get?

So, given all that, what should you get?

I think the best overall guide to buy for your first field guide is the Sibley Guide. When you're at home, you should also bookmark and use All About Birds. This way you have both a very good illustration guide and one using photos without paying for both, and you can work with both and decide which you prefer.

If you are someone who doesn't use a smart phone, then I suggest you get the Sibley guide in paper for the region of the country you live in. These recommendations are for U.S. based (and to a lesser extent Canada) birders. If you live in other regions of the world I don't have the knowledge to really help with specific suggestions, but hopefully you will get some guidance for what to look for in guides available for your region.

If you want to grow your collection beyond this first guide, I suggest you take a look at my Birdwatching Library, where I make suggestions for other titles you can consider for your own library.