I wholeheartedly agree with Burt. I can't imagine a book like this and
as cool as it may sound, a book like this would be a huge mess of crap bound
together and sold for thirty bucks. The best part of birding is getting
good so you can recognize a bird you only see a glimpse of. Also I think
that when you get down to identifying birds in these types of situations its
very personal thing that is learned from experienced, like learning bird
songs. Most of the descriptions in books describing bird songs and calls
don't make a lot of sense to me because I learned to recognize them myself,
(I hate to say it but the descriptions in Sibley make me wanna cry). Just
the same would be with a book devoted to the skulking bird. Very
imaginative of you but too unconventional to say the least.
-Brendan McGarry

Brendan McGarry
Seattle, WA
Uglyduckling at comcast.net
----- Original Message -----
From: "Guttman, Burt" <GuttmanB at evergreen.edu>
To: <birdbooker at zipcon.net>; <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2004 12:39 PM
Subject: RE: AN Unconventional field guide


> 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
>