“Gulls of the Americas”,
Steve Howell and Jon Dunn (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

Identifying gulls - particularly 1st and 2nd year birds - is one of birding’s most difficult skills to master, as anyone who’s ever stepped onto a beach in eg California, Kuwait, or Korea will know all too well. The variation in plumage seems endless. The variation in size seems endless. There are apparently more than a hundred species of gulls for every square km of sand, most of which have never been described by science before and certainly aren’t in any book you’ve ever owned. And for every species you think you’ve finally got sorted, there’ll always be that horrible possibility lurking on the horizon that some night-time rendezvous on a rooftop or a desolate offshore island has thrown up the spectre that haunts all gull-watchers - the unidentifiable hybrid, the ‘cross’ that could better be called the ‘rage’, the brown bag of feathers that will forever ‘defy all understanding’…

Writing a book on Gulls is not something therefore that should be tackled lightly, but fortunately for those of us looking for ‘larid enlightenment’ the “Peterson Reference Guides: Gulls of the Americas” is written by two expert and well-known birders (perhaps better-known in North America than in Europe or Asia, but well-known enough to inspire confidence anywhere), Steve Howell and Jon Dunn. Steve Howell is a WINGS tour leader and will be familiar to anyone who’s been to California’s Point Reyes Observatory, and Jon Dunn, also a WINGS tour leader, has been a major constituent of the US birding scene for decades (so all credit to the both of them for pressing ahead with such a potentially contentious book: these guys have serious reputations to hold on to…)

When I first showed a review copy of the new “Peterson Reference Guides: Gulls of the Americas” to a birding friend of mine his first reaction was to say, “Ah, now this is a proper book”. Proper - I knew exactly he meant by that. On the one level this is proper because it’s a re-assuringly weighty, solid, well-illustrated, well-designed book; and on the other it deals - in depth - with a subject, the field identification of Gulls, that most birders approach with equal measures of determination and trepidation. In other words, it’s a proper book, the sort of book you know as soon as you pick it up you’re going to want to own, you’re going to want to have in your library, going to want to discuss with like-minded friends - even though you’ll probably acknowledge somewhere in the back of your brain that you’ll never have the time to study it thoroughly or remember half of the mass of facts you just know will be contained within.

There have of course been other proper books on Gull ID, and it’s worth the briefest of re-caps to mention them for reasons that will become apparent. First of all was Jonathan Dwight’s ground-breaking “The Gulls (Laridae) of the World: Their Plumages, Moults, Variations, Relationships, and Distribution”, but that was back in 1925 and it hasn’t been widely available for, er, a while anyway. The second was Peter Grant’s “Gulls a Guide to Identification“, which set new standards when the first edition was published in the early 1980s and still sells today in an updated form. But it’s not with the works of either of those two authors that “Peterson Reference Guides: Gulls of the Americas” (henceforth GotA) is going to be compared with: no, the modern standard against which all gull ID books will have to be measured against is Klaus Malling Olsen and Hans Larsson’s “Gulls of Europe, Asia, and North America” (henceforth GEAN), published by Helm just three years ago in 2004. This superb book - again, large, solid, well-illustrated, and well-designed - took gull ID to previously undreamt of heights (and, incidentally set less welcome records for publishing errors - the first edition was so error-strewn that it was hastily withdrawn and a corrected version put out as soon as was possible) and it’s a tough truth that any new book will have to be at least as good if not better to persuade birders who already have GEAN to part with their money.

Having said that, I’m not sure how many birders in the US would’ve bought GEAN when it came out, of course, and this review perhaps needs to be split into two parts - ie for those who DON’T have GEAN, and those that DO.

So let’s start first then with any purchaser thinking of buying their first book on Gull ID. What would they be getting if they chose “Gulls of the Americas”?

The first thing they’d be getting is a well-produced reference book (not, take note, a “field-guide”) that in about 300 pages of photographs and 195 pages of very detailed “Species Accounts” covers all 36 species of resident, migrant, and vagrant Gulls (and a handful of subspecies and recognisable hybrids) that occur in both North and South America, including Greenland, the Galapagos and the Antarctic Peninsula. The book is packed with 1,160 photographs, admirably large range maps that are colour-keyed, and, judging from the admittedly fairly brief time I’ve had with the book, a taxonomically fairly conservative (the opening remarks on Vega Gull, for example, are a bit cautious) but generally extremely informative text. The species themselves have been neatly coralled into similar ‘groups’ (eg Masked Gulls and Large White-headed Gulls) which makes comparison of ‘lookalike’ gulls a far more manageable task than if each species was simply listed one after the other. Commendably these ‘lookalikes’ are always highlighted within the species descriptions themselves, which again makes for quick comparisons. There’s also an extensive section at the back of the book on that most thorniest of subjects: hybrids. Most of the section looks at the two “commonly and most readily-seen” hybrids - Glaucous-winged x Western and Glaucous-winged x American Herring, but there are also shorter texts on more exotic and unusual pairings eg Glaucous x Vega and American Herring x Kelp. I’m not going to analyse what the author’s have come up with - personally speaking, after my experiences in Korea, I don’t think we’re even close to an understanding of what constitutes a species in some cases so I don’t see how we can attempt to describe hybrids with any certainty - but the accounts are fascinating. It’ll be very interesting to see how many of them stand the test of time.

Before getting stuck into the species (and the hybrids) themselves, though, there is an excellent and thorough ‘must-read’ 37 page Introduction, which covers topics from “What is a Gull”, to gull taxonomy and gull topography (learning feather tracts, of course, is the absolute starting point for anyone wanting to take their Gull ID skills beyond identifying just the adults), and onto discussions on ‘individual variation’ and a lengthy look at plumages and ‘molt’ (as it’s spelt throughout. It’s worth pointing out here that the book follows the Humphrey-Parkes system of naming molt and plumages: therefore the authors talk extensively about ‘plumage cycles’ and ‘Pre-Basic, Basic, Alternative, and Formative Plumages’. To North American birders understanding these terms may be second-nature, but to Europeans who tend to talk about 1st and 2nd years, breeding and non-breeding etc it’s all a little more confusing. Perhaps one day we’ll all be talking ‘cycles’ this side of the pond as well, but that day seems some way off and whether that will impact on sales of this book only time will tell.) Skip this Intro at your own peril, as it not only sets the scene for the rest of the book extremely well it acknowledges the fluid nature of gull identification: when such expert authors assert that “the proportion of unidentifiable gulls never reaches zero” we all ought to take heed!

If the text looks to be thorough and highly informative, how do the photographs stand up? The blurb on the back cover of GotA states that it contains “1,160 carefully chosen color photographs”, and any book dealing with gulls will be initially judged on the quality and reproduction of its photographs. So how good are they? With a maximum of five photos (usually four) per plate, they’re a reasonable size and the vast majority are sharp and show the relevant features. I have to say I was initially surprised when I noticed that a number of the photos pre-date recent advances in digital photography, but there are virtually no ‘poor’ photos (a couple of the southern Gray-hooded Gulls are hardly worth including, but it’s not a commonly photographed species so it’s perhaps not too surprising that they are) and the vast majority are excellent, with some of eg the Sabine’s and Ivory Gulls photographs being even better than that. However, on the downside, some photos have been so heavily cropped that bill tips have been lost (the First-Cycle Kelp Gull at 28.15, Page 198 for instance) and more crucially the wing-tips of some birds have been lost: the flying Adult non-breeding Sabine’s Gull at 10.8 occupies the top half of the photo, losing half its primaries, for instance, the first-cycle European Herring Gull at 25B.17 loses at least three primary feathers from its spread wing, the flying Adult non-breeding Thayer’s Gull at 36.34 likewise. Considering how important clear views of the primaries are in identifying gulls this is pretty much unforgiveable - hopefully a second-edition will put the situation right.

Leaving aside some dubious photo-editing though if I were looking for a book on American gulls I’d buy this one. It’s essentially a well-written, well-illustrated and worthwhile book, and for the cover price - at least in the US where it will be on sale for just USD35.00 - good value for money. It’s definitely a book I’d want to have.

However, to move on to “those that DO”, would I still want “Peterson Reference Guides: Gulls of the Americas” if I already had Malling Olsen and Larsson’s “Gulls of Europe, Asia, and North America”? I guess that many birders will find the money to own both, but what if I had to make a choice?

The first thing that any potential purchaser is going to want to know is what new information is here that they don’t already have. It won’t take a genius to work out that the two books cover different parts of the world and therefore cover somewhat different species, though of course the majority of species are fully covered in both. GotA is intended as a reference for the Americas, whereas GEAN includes a number of European and Asian breeding gulls that don’t occur in North America but stops at the Mexican border in its coverage of those that do. That means GotA gives owners of GEAN information on striking gulls such as Gray, Swallow-tailed, and Dolphin as well as relatively obscure species like Belcher’s and Orlog’s Gulls. None of those species are likely to be vagrants outside the Americas so obsessive rarity-watchers in Europe and Asia won’t gain much, but for those of us who just like gulls GotA’s worth getting for these species alone.

Without making detailed comparisons of the texts in both books it’s not possible to say which is more accurate, but I doubt very much whether there’ll be anything radically new (or seriously erroneous) in GotA. Gulls haven’t changed THAT much in three years, and GEAN was years ahead of anything else that had been previously published. I’ve not read of any startlingly new field characters emerging in the intervening years (though there have been any number of small refinements as discussions on various bird forums will attest), and though taxonomy has been marching on gulls are notoriously difficult to pin down and ‘certainties’ have a disconcerting habit of becoming ‘disproved suppositions’ fairly quickly. In other words, there may well turn out to be minor differences in approach between the two books, but who’s to say which will prove to be correct anyway? (Besides species accounts there are other differences of course. Whilst Steve Howell is a photographer, and a proportion of the 1160 photographs used in the book are his, neither he nor Jon Dunn are illustrators. One of the most immediate differences between GotA and GEAN is the use of Hans Larsson’s superb illustrative paintings in the latter. Personally I prefer GEAN’s mix of photographs and paintings to GotA’s use of photos alone, but that’s a subjective call and though most birders will have an opinion I doubt whether many will consider it a ‘deal-breaker’.)

Potential purchasers may wonder though whether the poorly-cropped photos might be an echo of GEAN’s awfully botched first edition: in other words, are there mis-labelled or mis-captioned maps and photographs scattered throughout? If there are I haven’t found them yet: perhaps given heavy usage and a longer more detailed look other reviewers will find some, but then what book is ever totally error-free? In my opinion a few poorly cropped photos won’t dampen most people’s enthusiasm for what is undoubtedly an important, well-researched, and authoritative book - or ‘authoritative’ at least until a researcher makes a new DNA discovery and causes a massive re-write! The authors themselves, incidentally, aren’t claiming to have produced the last word in gull ID: in a rather nicely self-effacing passage in the Preface they say that the result of their years of hard work “attempts to synthesize present knowledge but is simply another stepping stone through the seeming quicksand of gull identification. Inevitably, some of what we propose here will be modified as collective knowledge about gulls continues to grow…”.

Acknowledging from the outset that your book will inevitably be superceded is risky from a sales point of view but actually makes good sense when dealing with such a complex group of mobile, inter-breeding, and rapidly-evolving birds, and frankly I’d have been disappointed if there had been any attempt by the authors to suggest that they ‘d just produced the definitive and ‘last word’ book on Gull ID. But a cautious approach shouldn’t in any way detract from the amount of knowledge that’s bound between the pages of this new book. I can already envisage the hours I’m going to spend with it sat in front of my laptop trying to make sense of some gulls I photographed in Vancouver some years ago and of gulls I’ve yet to even see: I may not resolve the IDs for once and for all, but I reckon that armed with “Peterson Reference Guides: Gulls of the Americas” I’m going to at least get very close…

Summary:
Hardback (2007), 568 pages, “Gulls of the Americas”.
A “Reference Guide” to be used in a car or at home rather than in the field, “Gulls of the Americas” is an ambitious, detailed look at the 36 species of gull found in North and South America. Some birders may not like the fact that there are just photographs accompanying the maps and text rather than photos and paintings, but that shouldn’t detract from the enormous amount of information (and welcome note of caution that the authors strike) contained within its pages. The disappointing over-cropping of some of the images is a distraction, but on the whole this appears to be an excellent, well-researched, informative and good-value addition to the identification literature on one of birding’s most challenging group of birds. Putting your head above the parapet and publishing a book on identifying Gulls is a brave act: no sooner has your precious manuscript been turned into your enduring legacy than some researcher (working somewhere so obscure even he/she isn’t sure they’re spelling the name of the nearest town correctly) will post up a paper which threatens to turn your work on its head. It’s not something I’d want to ever attempt, and all credit to Howell and Dunn for taking the risk.

Mike has also reviewed this book. Read his thoughts right here.