World Bird Field Guides

:: North America

Canada in its entirety; Saint Pierre and Miquelon (a small French territory off Newfoundland’s southern coast); United States of America including Alaska and its islands, the 48 contiguous states, and nearshore islands (including the Florida Keys) but excluding Hawaii and insular areas in the Caribbean and Pacific; and “adjacent waters to a distance of 200 miles [approx. 322 km] from land or half the distance to a neighboring country, whichever is less” (ABA).

The Scoop

If you get only one guide to North American birds, get David Allen Sibley’s The Sibley Guide to Birds (ISBN 978-0-679-45122-8). No other guide matches the quality and comprehensiveness of Sibley’s illustrations. Proportions and shapes are very lifelike. Almost every species is illustrated in flight — even species that are rarely seen in flight, like grebes. Furthermore, no other guide presents as many age and geographic variations. Sibley has 18 images of Savannah Sparrows; National Geographic (see below) shows four.

Sibley’s layout and organization is very helpful and easy to use. For difficult groups (accipiters, hummingbirds, “drab gray birds of the arid southwest,” etc.), there are sidebars with additional information and illustrations. Ecological and behavioral information is generally very sparse, except sometimes when it is helpful in identification.

The Sibley guide is a little too large to carry easily in the field, unless you keep it in a bag. Some rufous tones are a tad bright (e.g., making the Brown Thrasher look too orange), but this affects only a few species and isn’t likely to cause confusion in the field. And of course, with every passing year, the taxonomy grows more outdated. More important are these two points:

1. Sibley covers all regularly occurring North American birds but leaves out dozens of vagrants and a few extinct or presumed-extinct species like Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Carolina Parakeet, and Bachman’s Warbler. Southern vagrants like Green-breasted Mango and Fan-tailed Warbler are excluded, as are Palearctic wanderers like Smew and Green Sandpiper. The Alaskan islands, both coasts, areas along the Mexican border, and south Florida are most likely to turn up vagrants not covered in Sibley.

2. In some cases, the range maps are out of date or just plain wrong. For example, Prairie Falcons are scarce but regular winter residents on prairie fragments in western Missouri (or even farther east in suitable habitat), but the Sibley map doesn’t show them getting any farther east than western Kansas and Oklahoma. Problems like this could be confusing, particularly for birders visiting regions with which they are not very familiar.

But, none of these problems should be significant enough to dissuade you from buying the guide. You should be aware of the problems and possibly compensate for them by obtaining the National Geographic guide (see below), but serious birders who visit or reside in North America really do need The Sibley Guide to Birds. It’s a very, very good guide.

Also Consider

I recommend supplementing Sibley with the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, Fifth Edition (ISBN 978-0-7922-5314-3). Avoid the older third and fourth editions. The fifth edition covers 967 species (to Sibley’s 810), illustrating scores of vagrants and other species left out of Sibley. It also has better maps in some cases, and it’s smaller and lighter.

The illustrations are not as extensive as Sibley’s, as I mentioned above, and they are not as good either. But in perusing the fifth edition of the guide, I was pleased to see that many plates have been updated. Chickadees and titmice, for example, look much more realistic now. In earlier editions, their jizz (particularly head shape) was off. Unfortunately, other plates like warblers and sparrows haven’t been updated. Of course, general impression and shape are very important, if subtle, parts of an ID, so poorly drawn birds could lead to confusion in the field. Hopefully, other plates will be improved in future editions. But it’s a good book, and it makes an excellent complement to Sibley.

A third book to consider is the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America (ISBN 978-0-618-57423-0), which uses digitally manipulated photographs to illustrate the birds. It’s very compact; it should fit into a vest or pants pocket for use in the field. I don’t own the guide and haven’t used it very much in the field, but it’s received high praise, and it might be handy to carry in the field for quick reference. But it doesn’t go very deep. Do you need to know if Horned Grebes show a white trailing edge to the wing in flight? Sorry. Better have a Sibley at home or in the car!

Regional Guides

There are, of course, many, many regional guides for the United States and Canada. In my experience, these are largely unnecessary (and usually inferior) for identification purposes, though they are often very helpful for learning about local status and distribution.

However, if you plan to remain in or visit only one area of the continent and want to keep things simpler, you might consider either The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (ISBN 978-0-679-45120-4) or The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America (ISBN 978-0-679-45121-1). They are trimmed down versions of the original guide, each with fewer species to sift through. They are much smaller too — nicer for taking into the field.

One important note: The range maps in these East and West editions are considerably improved over the maps in the original Sibley. They were thoroughly revised and updated, resulting in greater accuracy and clarity.

What’s East and what’s West? For some reason, the maps in the front of each book are a bit vague on the subject, but the areas are actually well defined. The eastern guide covers Nunavut, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas (excluding the Trans-Pecos region) and all states and provinces eastward. The western guide covers Northwest Territories, Alberta, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas (Trans-Pecos region only) and everything westward, including Alaska of course. (See a map.)

Avoid

There are literally dozens of field guides to North American birds. Many cover “backyard” birds or something like 200 “popular” birds. Some are arranged by color, habitat, and/or shape. These may be helpful for beginners, children, and dilettantes (which is fine), but they aren’t what serious birders need. Guides bearing the names Smithsonian, Golden, Audubon, and Peterson — however attractive and historically important they may be — just don’t have the breadth, depth, accuracy, and helpful features of the guides I’ve discussed above. Buy them if you’re a collector, or curious, or want to admire beautiful pictures. I got my start with guides like these, so I have a soft spot for them, but they stay on the shelf unless I’m feeling sentimental.

This article was updated on December 25, 2007.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website