Browsing Bliss Awaits You

It appears you're using Internet Explorer or an early version of Edge, which is a bit like watching a black-and-white TV with "rabbit ears." You're missing symmetry, joy and actual knowledge — not only here on my website but across the internet. I suggest you upgrade to Chrome or Firefox. You’ll discover a lot more nature, maybe even actual rabbit ears.

— Bryan

Conifers by Jerry Jenkins

A Tribute to the Field Guide

Resources for Learning Nature from Books — Not Apps

Nature apps are like movies: the book is better. Yes, you can now carry a virtual library of field guides on your gadget. But if you really want to learn to identify stuff in nature — from birds to butterflies, oaks to orchids — get yourself an actual book. There among its pages you will find detail, order and the harmony of families.

Don Eckelberry’s grebes.

This assault of mine on nature apps is not one of those polemics dedicated to the “tactile” pleasures of real books. I read books and e-books with equality of enjoyment; and these apps do have their place in the field. What I’m saying instead is that when you resolve to learn a new taxon in nature, in all its diversity and beauty and complexity, you will advance as a student more easily from words and images on the page.

Nature apps foist upon us, figuratively and literally, small views of the world — cheap short-cuts to your mystery species. Type in the state, maybe habitat, choose a petal or feather color, for example, and the approximate size or shape of your organism. The app delivers a list. No searching through actual pages of possibilities, no discovering and learning as you go, no seeing how the panoply of species fall into place, how they resemble or relate to one another in form or function. Learning nature with an app is like learning a language with a phrase book. You’ll get by, you’ll be wrong a lot, and your knowledge will be cursory.

More than 40 years ago I began to discover birds by wandering outside with binoculars and roaming the frontiers of my field guide — outside with birds and then again back home at night. On a single page of the Audubon Water Bird Guide I could witness Don Eckelberry’s spectacular grebe illustrations — and I could see and feel what it means to be a grebe in form and function. As I leafed through Roger Tory Peterson’s flycatchers, I saw what made a Contopus a Contopus and how a Contopus was certainly not an Empidonax. And in Ann Haven Morgen’s Field Book of Ponds and Streams, well, those pages were the next best thing to getting wet in actual ponds and streams.

Sure, there’s a place for apps. If you already know birds, for example, but cannot recall the marks on Great Crested Flycatcher versus Brown-crested Flycatcher (tertial edges and belly, by the way) — it’s fine to whip out the app and double-check in the field. Apps are great for that. But if you are new to birds (or any other group), do not use an app for learning. Use a book.

Birding apps have proliferated with gimmicks masquerading as teaching tools: one warbler app, for example, has so many ways to look at a warbler on a little screen that you might never look at actual warblers in trees. The apps remind me of weight-loss gadgets: so many under the sun, all competing for your dollars, none of them really that useful (except for the Sibley app, which I’ll get to below). Read your field guide instead; wander its pages on an expedition of text and illustrations and understanding.

Recommendations

Here below is my field guide to field guides, particularly some amazing guides to butterflies and dragonflies (among my areas of expertise) plus some other taxa. Many of these guides cover New England or the Northeast (where many of my readers and I reside). If you do not live up here, fear not: you will still find superb regional field guides — everything from The Butterflies of Cascadia by Robert Michael Pyle to Dragonflies and Damselflies of Northeast Ohio by Larry Rosche et al.

So visit your local bookshop and buy some of these books. Remember, these are my suggestions for your learning. I’ve listed web resources and worthy apps as well — but please don’t obsess on the gadget while you’re outside: you’ll miss a lot of nature, which isn’t very natural. Finally, this is a living document, er, web page — I’ll add your worthy suggestions. Send them by email. Thanks!

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Butterflies and Moths

Butterflies of Pennsylvania: A Field Guide by James L. Monroe and David M. Wright — If you live anywhere in the Northeast, and want a masterpiece when it comes to butterfly identification and life histories, you will do no better than this guide. Note, however, that unless you live in Pennsylvania, you won’t have species distribution maps to help guide your way in identification; and this guide may lack certain species or include others that you won’t find in your state. Even so, this field guide is so good that you might want to buy and annotate it with your local species. Also note that images in the book are from pinned specimens rather than living butterflies. As a result, you may want another field guide to help you learn how various families and genera appear, carry themselves, and go about their business in the field. Not only does this guide cover the essentials of butterfly identification and life histories for most species in the Northeast, it includes special accounts of some of the classic identification challenges, with field marks you simply won’t find in other guides. It is a dream field guide.

The ROM Field Guide to Butterflies of Ontario – The province’s species richness matches, in large part, that of New England. But the strength of this guide for novice and advancing lepidopterists is its text descriptions of butterfly families, genera and species, and its inclusion of caterpillar and pupa photos. Overall, it’s a ton of learning packed into a single guide. Yes, the distribution maps cover only Ontario, which is a bit of problem if you don’t live there. But you can solve the map issue by annotating your copy with the species in your own region (with resources like the Vermont Butterfly Survey). You’ll learn a lot in the process.

A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America (second edition) by Jeffrey Glassberg – If you travel a lot and want the single most exhaustive field guide to North American butterflies (all photos, little text), this is the book to get. If you’re in New England, I suggest you buy this book and the Ontario or Pennsylvania guide (or all three).

Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer’s Guide by Rick Cech and Guy Tudor – Not a field guide, this large-format book is a masterpiece. With essays about butterfly biology and ecology, along with detailed species descriptions and spectacular photos, Cech and Tudor offer us a spectacular textbook to these wonderful insects (bring it along in the car when you head out butterflying). By the way, it’s out of print, so search for used copies.

Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie – How fortunate we are, we Northeastern elites. We’ve got the first big replacement to Charles Covell’s classic moth guide to eastern North America. (I can’t for the life of me figure out why Houghton Mifflin Harcourt doesn’t show this book on its website.)

Les Papillons du Quebec by Louis Handfield – Covering moths and butterflies, this book is entirely in French (c’est la vie.), but it’s exhaustive. Get the identification guide and not the scientific version (unless you are a full-fledged moth fanatic).

Dragonflies and Damselflies

The Dragonflies and Damselflies of Algonquin Provincial Park and the Surrounding Area (second edition) by Colin D. Jones, et al. – Another superb field guide and textbook for learning from Ontario. The species diversity matches that of northern New England fairly well. But the real strength of this book is its text and necessary illustrations of morphological characters essential in identification. I use this guide as the textbook and field guide for my Eagle Hill Institute seminar on dragonflies and damselflies in Maine. (Again, you might want to mark up your copy with extra or missing species from your location, using resources such as the Vermont Dragonfly and Damselfly Survey.)

Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East by Dennis Paulson — Not only is Paulson one of the most knowledgeable biologists on Planet Earth, his field guide — there’s a western version as well — will have you covered no matter where you roam on the continent. For all-around use, this is now the continent’s go-to field guide. By the way, coming in February of 2019 from Dennis (and Princeton University Press) will be Dragonflies and Damselflies: A Natural History.

Damselflies of the Northeast by Ed Lam — Another masterpiece and one of the finest field guides to any taxon. Even if you buy other Odonata books, buy this one as well. (Incidentally, Ed is now producing a Peterson field guide to dragonflies, which you must have when it is published.)

A Field Guide to Dragonflies and Damselflies of Massachusetts by Blair Nikula, Jennifer L. Loose, and Matthew R. Burne. Not as comprehensive as the other guides I mention above, but it’s nice and concise and packed with essentials. I continue to use it in the field and in the office.

Botany

The Northern Forest Atlas Guides — Northern elites win again. We need look no further than this masterful suite of guide books, pamphlets, posters and web resources covering a region stretching roughly from Nova Scotia to Minnesota. If you don’t live in the Northern Forest (sandwiched between the oak forests of the eastern U.S. and the boreal forest of eastern Canada) these guides will make you want to move here. When you do, you’ll discover revealing and beautiful photography, along with efficient text, as your gateway to knowledge. Those ericaceous plants in the banner image at the top of this webpage come from the Atlas’ first major publication: Woody Plants of the Northern Forest by Jerry Jenkins. So much more is on the way — and we shall all be enlightened as a result. But don’t take my word for it. Visit the Northern Forest Atlas website, where you shall weep with joy or, if you haven’t moved here yet, with wistfulness.

GoBotany — Yeah, okay, it’s not a book (but it’s based on a book, the outstanding Flora Novae Angliae by Arthur Haines). This website is among the finest examples of what the world wide web (otherwise littered with garbage) ought to be.

Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide by Lawrence Newcomb. Very much in need of an overhaul, but still very helpful.

Other Insects

Places and Other Critters

Nature Online

As you learn from books, consider this (incomplete) list of online resources — mostly about insects and mostly covering the Northeastern US and adjoining Canada. iNaturalist, e-Butterfly and Odonata Central are among the essential crowd-sourced datasets (like eBird) to help you find more nature and submit data of your own.

Butterflies and Moths

Dragonflies and Damselflies

General Data, Learning and Conservation

Worthy General Field Apps

If You Are New to Birds

No other taxon is so rich with books. But whether you’re learning or already in the know, the Sibley Guide to Birds is simply a masterpiece.

David Sibley’s innovative layout features two species per page, arranged side-by-side. Sibley surrounds illustrations with snippets of essential text pointing out crucial field marks. Short essays cover key birding challenges.  If you travel, buy the single volume for all of North America (but lift it with your knees, not your back). Get the second edition. Two smaller volumes (with smaller images, sometimes painfully too small) cover birds of the east or the west. By the way, when you do buy a birding app, get the Sibley eGuide to Birds of North America — the second edition, released recently.

If Sibley’s books present a birder with illustration overload, the novice and advancing birder would do well with the National Geographic series. It offers fewer choices among plumages, in a good way, emphasizing those we’re most likely to encounter. Be sure to buy the most recent edition, which is the seventh at the time of this blog post. In this series, owning both eastern and western volumes, with more mini learning essays in each one, is probably better than owning the single combined guide.

Another suggestion for novice birders: National Geographic Birding Essentials by Jonathan Alderfer and Jon L. Dunn, probably the best general book out there on how to learn birdwatching skills. Sibley’s Birding Basics is also great.