Dear Ian, Rolan, Rob, Margaret, Ruth, and Other Tweeters on This Thread,

As soon as I read Ian's opener, I had the same idea that Roland expressed. I think the electronic bird field guide is coming soon. I do have a few thoughts on this, however.

Perhaps our asking today about the desing of the perfect bird field guide might be like someone asking about the perfect buggy whip 150 years ago. The electronics people may soon start taking more serious chomps out of the book market, and the time may be at hand when books become curios, of interest only to a few monastic types such as myself. However, I really think that that time is still a ways off.

I received a Palm device for Christmas. My wife picked it out for me. I smiled, looked at the directions, and left it on the dresser for a few weeks. Then she asked if she could have it. I was happy to oblige--when will people learn that all a birder wants or needs for Christmas can be found in the ABA catalogue? Anyway, she used it for about six months. The other day, I noticed a rough draft of a "for sale" ad lying on a table next to the dusty palmtop. My wife may realize close to half the $180 she originally spent, if she can sell the used unit.

The hand-held computing devices I have seen so far do not impress me. Similarly, I thought the personal computers of twelve or fifteen years ago were pretty silly. I tried them out in the eighties and early nineties and decided that they were not really very good replacements for what already existed, at least for my purposes.

The computers that came out a few years afterwards were excellent replacements, and I have bought one and like it--I'm writing this reply on it, after all. Palms and such are, I think, a lot like those clumsy, early computers. A few techno people will always love having the latest thing, and not mind paying a high price. The bugs will be worked out, and something more useful will come out. Then the rest of us can buy one. Right now, I do not like having to re-learn penmanship in order to tell a little machine what I want. I have excellent handwriting and do not intend to remake that hand to suit a quirky little machine!

A reasonable hand-held device would have to have exellent quality graphics that load instantly, or at least as fast as I can find a Flicker in a field guide, which is pretty dang fast. The great storage potential of such devices would mean we could finally see all the plumage sequences of gulls. In fact, you could watch a little video of an egg being laid, hatching, and the nestling being fed (or the precocial chick finding its first food). You'd watch it mature and go through all the moults up to adulthood, and then into seasonal moults if desired. Maybe it would even lead to the poor bird getting eaten by a Sharpie in the end, all in clear imagery that you could speed up, stop, rewind, and instantly go to any place you'd like. You could get the hybrids known to science, too. The images would not necessarily be viewed on a screen. Could they not be projected as three-dimensional images, in the manner of holagrams? Preferably, this technology would not require us to wear goofy-looking things on our heads. We birders already have enough goofy-looking outdoor gear.

At the press of a button (or a verbal command or the flick of a buggy-whip) you could hear calls, songs, drumming, and the sound of its footsteps in the mud if desired. In fact, you could also see those tracks in the mud, and get stills of various feathers, skeleton and individual bones, and the various taxonomic information. All of this would be in a little package that you could drop onto a sidewalk or into a solution of boiling brine, no problem. It would update itself regularly, so that the bird we now call the American Robin could be renamed the American Migratory Red-Thrush by the powers that be, and the birder would not need to spend his time fiddling with ridiculous computer update procedures or pay the handy-dandy little fees that always seem to come along with them.

I have a little field notebook right now. It does not do very many of the above things--but I have dropped it onto and into various hard or wet substrates, with no damage recorded. I can write down what I think the bird looks like, and draw a picture, too. It cost me twenty-seven cents.

One final thought (and back to the twentieth and early twenty-first century again). The perfect field guide already exists, in my opinion. It is by Killian Mullarney, Lars Svensson, and Dan Zetterstroem. Unfortunately for us, it is called Birds of Europe. Nothing against Sibley and his excellent but ponderous field guide, but Mullarney et al will set the standard for field guides for years to come. About the only tiny improvement I could suggest would be a curtailment in the authors' use of the exclamation point.



Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

garybletsch at yahoo.com



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