I usually wouldn't bother with this kind of thing; as someone else
suggested, Ian, it sounds like you're grasping for something unusual to
write, and you'd probably be better off going out and just enjoying the
birds. Anyway, you suggest a book that shows

> Not the nice portraits in standard guide but in situations like parts
> hidden from view by vegetation, bad weather, sleeping birds, etc.

Look at Dunn and Garrett's field guide to warblers; it has plates of
undertail patterns, because we often see the little guys above us in the
trees and that's all we can see before they disappear. (I have a memory of
a British birder one spring at High Island, Texas, calling to his buddy,
"Yellow undertail-coverts!") Those plates make good sense. Now imagine all
the species of birds just in North America that might be seen skulking
through the bush and all the possible parts that might be exposed briefly
(side of head, wing, belly, and so on) and imagine all the plates someone
would have to produce to show all those things, as well as all the other
difficult situations we might encounter in the field. Can you really
imagine that producing such a book would be feasible? I can't. (Kenn
Kaufmann's field guide to advanced birding does some of that, for difficult
situations, and Zimmer's The Western Bird Watcher [now available under a
different title, I think] has some good diagnoses of the same kind.) But I
could turn that into a useful exercise in learning bird identification for
self-testing or small-group cooperative testing; folks can make up their own
sets of glimpses of similar birds, especially since it's so easy to get
color xeroxes at places like Kinko's, and use them for learning features to
focus on to make discriminations. Anyway, much as I love the bird books
myself, it's still more fun and rewarding to go out and experience the
birds.

Burt Guttman guttmanb at evergreen.edu
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 360-456-8447
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S.E., Olympia 98503