At the onset of this post, let me firmly state that I love taxonomy. I even attended taxonomy classes at university. Biogeography, speciation, splitting, lumping, all that jazz really sets my boat afloat (well, the lumping not so much). I also love bird identification. And I believe there’s a place for taxonomy, and there’s a place for bird identification. And since April this year, I strongly believe that these places should be mutually exclusive:
- The place for taxonomy is a magazine and an armchair.
- The place for bird identification is a field guide and a field.
But … let me quickly take a deep breath here …
THERE IS NO ROOM FOR TAXONOMY IN A FIELD GUIDE! NONE WHATSOEVER!
Let me explain.
I’ve been birding for 30 years now, and for the last 20 year, I’ve mostly birded in the same geographic regions. This means I know my birds quite well. I also know the field guides I use very well, and I know where to find which bird species in the book. More importantly, I know which groups/families occur in these regions, which ones resemble each other, and where to find them in my books even in cases where similar groups are found in different segments of my field guide because they are not closely related to each other. You see, the species in my field guides, as in the vast majority of field guides everywhere, are in taxonomic order.
I never gave this last aspect much thought, and I never felt it had any impact whatsoever on my ability to identify birds. Then came April, and with it my first ever trip to South-East Asia.
The fact that this was my first visit to this very diverse and exciting region meant that I basically knew nothing about its birds, which – I felt – turned me into a complete novice to birds and birding:
I did not know a single species during the first few days and had to look up every single bird I saw in my field guides. I knew nothing about their vocalizations. I knew nothing about the vast majority of bird families occurring in the region. Heck, I didn’t know that these bird families even existed in the first place, as they have no representative in my neck of the globe. I had no idea about the taxonomic order of families occurring in South-East Asia. I was completely reliant on my field guides, they were the masters and I was their hostage and slave.
All I knew was how to walk around, find birds and get them into my binocular view. The rest, I felt and hoped, was the job of my field guide: allow me to make a definite identification of what I was seeing out in the field as quickly as possible and with the least mistakes possible. This, I thought, was the process field guides were designed for, their raison d’etre: to allow the identification of birds one sees outside in the field.
Oh boy, was I mistaken. And boy, did I make mistakes.
Is this a Greater Green Leafbird in leaves or is this a leaf in Greater Green Leafbirds? You see, that’s what you need field guides for. It does not matter much in such a situation whether the Leafbird is more closely related to a Flowerpecker than the leaves are to a Leafbird.
Working with field guides and without background knowledge was a horrible experience. I suffered, I lost birding time, and I made the most stupid mistakes imaginable. Not the kind of mistakes one makes when trying to differentiate between Willow and Alder Flycatcher or Acrocephalus-warblers purely on the basis of visual field marks. No, we are talking about truly embarrassing stuff.
And I soon found out that the main source of these mistakes was … well, my inexperience in that particular region, of course, but beyond that … the taxonomic order of species within my field guides! Yes, not the content of the guides themselves, simply the order in which the species are arranged within the book made my life so much harder there than it could have been.
Why? Well, for the following reasons:
- Similar bird species are scattered throughout the book and not next to each other
If you see an unknown bird in the field, you will quickly flip through your guide until you find a bird that is a reasonable fit. Once you have found such a “reasonable fit”, you will likely not flip through the entire remainder of your field guide to make sure there isn’t a similar species in an entirely unrelated group. No, you’re out in the field where time spent not looking at the field but at a book will mean potential lifers could sneak by you undetected! If much later you realize that there are other similar species, just not on the same page but somewhere else in your field guide, it is likely much too late to get back onto the bird and verify which one it really was you were seeing. This was probably the most severe and most common mistake.
- You will miss species because you don’t know they even exist and are similar to others you are seeing often
Okay, the point above sounds a bit abstract but actually happened to me. I was seeing all sorts of small to very small songbirds with yellow bellies and a greenish back in the dense foliage of Indonesia’s trees. It was difficult to get good looks at them and they therefore consumed a good portion of my birding time. Soon I learned that all the birds I was seeing were either some female-type Sunbirds or a species called Common Iora. After a while I had seen all the female-type sunbird species there were in the area and plenty of Ioras and stopped looking at small yellow birds in dense foliage. There just didn’t seem to be a potential for additional lifers anymore. Until I accidentally stumbled upon the Golden-bellied Gerygone one evening while browsing through my field guide. I was shocked! “In failure lies opportunity”, and luckily I noticed this while still being in Indonesia. In the next couple of days, I specifically searched for this species and lo and behold: It turned out I had been seeing and (mostly) hearing the Gerygone for more than 10 days already, and commonly so, but never noticed it as I thought all birds of this general kind were either female sunbirds or Ioras.
This is not a Common Iora. This is not an Olive-backed, or Plain, or Plain-throated, or Purpel-throated Sunbird. This is Gerygone, Golden-bellied Gerygone !
- There is no visual structure behind the order of bird families as you can’t compare genetic codes in the field
Let’s say you’ve gotten to the point where you know an unidentified species you are looking at is from a certain group – say – a tailorbird. The bird is moving fast in dense vegetation and you know there are several species of tailorbird in your area, but you just don’t know on which features to focus. No problem, you think, as you just have to open the page with tailorbirds in your guide and have a quick glance at the plate, then get another quick view of the bird to verify the crucial field marks. But where within your field guide are the tailorbirds? You open it anywhere and find that you are at the Munias. Now, do you flip forward from here or backward? You jump backwards and land at the larks. Same question: where do you go from here? Eventually you consult the index, go to the relevant page, check the plate and … the bird is gone. Ciao, lifer! This situation is plain torture – hear me? – torture when you have walked through a silent forest for an hour with scarcely a bird and suddenly find yourself within a big, moving mixed-species flock of 10+ species, half of which you’ve never seen before. Time is of the essence, and the taxonomic order in field guides is the worst time-suck after Facebook.
- Taxonomic order is a-changin’
Even if you’ve learned the general order of families in your field guide by heart, you’re not safe. Taxonomy is changing fast, and no matter where you bird, you’ll want to use at least two field guides. Well, good luck because the books were likely published in different years when a different taxonomic order was considered the norm, and thus the order of families will vary considerably between the different books. So it is not enough to memorize the general taxonomic order of things, you have to memorize it for every single book you are using!
- Bird genera and common names are a-changin’
Due to the frequent changes in bird taxonomy and the ever-changing and differing common (English) names of species, birds may vanish if you are using different references, like two or three different guides or online resources like xeno-canto. An example: you are seeing a nice blue bird on Java and easily identify it as a Sunda Blue Robin Cinclidium diana with you field guide. Now you want to know its song and go to xeno-canto. Typing in “Sunda Blue Robin” will get you no results. Then you try the genus Cinclidium and get … no results. Then you start browsing and surfing and squeezing the web until you find out that the Sunda Blue Robin of your field guide is also known by the common name “Sunda Robin” (without the “blue”), and that it was recently moved to another genus, Myiomela. Again, this means you are losing time when you try to cross-reference an identification. At home this isn’t much of a problem. But if this time-loss happens in the field because you can’t find one species you’ve identified with field guide A in field guide B even by using B’s index, let alone by flipping through the pages because the families are in a completely different order, you’re … you know … not as happy a birder as you’d like to be in Indonesia.
Scarlet-headed Flowerpeckers offer much-needed eye candy when you are mostly busy sorting out the Ioras from the Gerygones or the Leafbirds from the leaves.
These are just a few of the reasons why I think sorting bird species according to their genetic relationship in a field guide (essentially a tool for identifying birds in the field) is so fundamentally flawed that it hurts. Not only does it hurt the brain’s common-sense areas, it also hurts the birding by making it much harder than it ought to be.
I am fully aware that others may have an entirely different opinion, and I’d love to hear and hotly debate it in the comments section.
Fire away merrily.
I’m a newer birder so might just have less to say on this. I see all your points though! My only beef is that the guides that are out there organized in a way not based on taxonomic order are often of terrible quality. I’ve found guides organized by the bird’s color, but the range maps, info, and use of one horrible quality photo has made me want to scream.
There’s the Crossley Guide for the eastern US which veers off from being strictly taxonomic, and I really enjoy it. He still kept to the groups but put birds that looked similar next to each other for easier comparison (I think this is a good idea when you start learning the gestalt of the groups), and it does work.
Crossley, along with some other prominent birders and authors, presented a suggested species order for the ABA area here – http://www.aba.org/birding/v41n6p44.pdf
Crossley pretty much used that order in his guide. I believe most of the same people wrote a similar article for Palearctic birds, but I haven’t read it.
I support this. Like Jochen, I like taxonomy. The prospect that falcons are more closely related to parrots and passerines than they are to hawks is fascinating. But does that mean they should be moved in field guides? I don’t think so.
But a different scheme wouldn’t be perfect. In Jochen’s situation, I don’t know if all of those “small to very small songbirds with yellow bellies and a greenish back” could be put together in a field guide since it seems many of them are female sunbirds. It sounds like that field guide needs a “similar species” section in the species accounts.
Taxonomic order is at least a broadly-agreed standard shared between different fieldguides; so if you’re going to get rid of it you need to be sure that you can think of something better.
I went on a family holiday to Australia as a child and in the days before the internet the only field guide I could get in time was one where the birds were arranged by habitat. And you could see why someone thought it made sense, but it was completely maddening. Not least because birds aren;t quite that reliable.
Some slight tweaking of the order so that, for example, the swifts and swallows are together, and move the birds of prey out from the middle of the waterbirds: yeah, sure, I think that makes sense. But that’s only going to go a small way towards solving the greeny-yellow bird problem unless you actually split up closely related groups of birds and arrange them by colour?—?which would drive me nuts, personally.
The longer term solution is electronic field guides which can be searched by colour, by family, by habitat, by size… the best you could do with a paper guide is probably multiple indexes and a key of the kind you get in flower guides, although TBH I’m not sure it would be worth the extra pages.
Argh, typos.
Would you like some cheese with that whine, Jochen?
I hate it when field guides abandon taxonomy. I like to know that when I’m flipping through an unfamiliar guide book in a new region that I can roughly expect to find the ducks at the front, the pittas in the middle and the sparrows at the back. You need to learn taxonomy to be a good birder, so you can quickly narrow down a bird to at least genus before you consult your book
Interesting post Jochen. My first thought was simply that you didn’t put in enough work in before your trip. If you do that then you always risk sliding back to rank beginner status. Birders who are used to being at the top of their game back home often have egos which rebel against this. The response is often: ‘it must be someone else’s fault that I suck in the field’. Perhaps rather than looking to dish out blame its time to find a bit of humility and resolve to put in some time researching a region long before actually getting on a plane. Pre-internet this research was hard work- books were rare, audio impossible but now its so easy. For me researching before a trip is the start of the fun. I still hire guides at times though- you can pore over books and audio files for years but still learn more in 5 minutes with a local expert.
The one redeeming point of this article is the angle that for beginners taxo structure of field guides can feel impenetrable to begin with. I get the point but I do wonder what the alternative might be? In the UK publishers have experimented with field guides using non-taxonomic structures and I have to say they are mostly useless. Size, colour and shape are so variable between ages, genders and individuals of a species that picking one of those as the basis is hopeless. Habitat guides seem like a good idea to non birders but in reality most birds don’t stick to one habitat so thats usually a waste of time too. Taxonomy is actually a good structure- 9 times out of 10 the species you will confuse are close relatives. Yes taxonomy changes but for the most part we’re just talking little splits and lumps. Its not like parrots and albatross get assigned and removed from passerines every 5 years.
This comes down to what a field guide is for. Is it to hold the hand of rank beginners making their first baby steps in bird ID, a book they don’t open until the bird is on their lap? Or is to be a radically condensed portable summary of the best information on species of a region for use by both beginners and experts before during and after birding?
Very interesting and somewhat heretical post, Jochen. Coincidentally, I read a letter in Birding magazine this morning that made a very similar argument. For at least a moment, I was swayed.
Then I recalled how much I despised my first field guide, which sorted birds by color. I realized that the learning curve for any bird watcher includes a steady diet of taxonomy. And I recognized that most of us field ornithologists wouldn’t have it any other way, unless there was a better way to organize families, genera, and species that didn’t obscure rather than illuminate the relationships between them all.
Now if you want to talk about a universal taxonomy, I can get behind that…
Which field guide? Craig Robson’s? That is an intimidating book. My first trip to SE Asia I mostly used a small photographic field guide and searched for the missing species in Google images. Birding in new places requires a whole new skillset, especially taking quick notes and sketches. After living there for a while, I was very glad after I became familiar with the Robson’s. Seems like your frustrations come from not taking the time to study. I agree with Duncan, and would go farther in saying that we’re not birders if we don’t get the natural history perspective that taxonomy brings and can appreciate the underlying (and surprisingly vast) differences in similar looking birds. But still, great article, fun read and a welcome new perspective, and i envy you as a border exploring new lands. P.s., field guides that are ordered by color are well meaning but crappy. P.s.s. your conundrum should be solved by insets in guides that compare similar species.
Do the strict taxonomists in this comment thread think that falcons should be with parrots and away from raptors in field guides? Or do they agree with Grant who pointed out that it just makes sense to have them together in the guide? Ditto for Harry’s thoughts on putting swifts and swallows together in a guide.
Why not have some field guides that do follow taxonomic sequences, and others that don’t? Why insist that ALL field guides must adhere to one standard or another?
Oh wait, that’s the situation we have now. I guess I don’t understand what this entire post is complaining about.
Me, I much prefer taxonomically arranged guides, for the reasons given by Duncan above. It wasn’t until I started thinking taxonomically that I really began to *learn* about birds. Otherwise, in my opinion you are merely as blind as the ancient Greeks when it comes to understanding what it is you’re seeing the field.
Besides, taxonomy won’t be as fluid forever as it is now.
The fluidity of taxonomy is only one of the reasons to use a different standard for ordering. To me, it’s not the main reason. What is the purpose of field guides? To identify birds. Thus, the ordering of species in a field guide should be the one most conducive to identification. A strict taxonomic ordering, I think we can all agree, is NOT the best for ID purposes. I realize that there may not ever be a consensus on what actually is the most ID-friendly ordering scheme. But I think we can find something better than the taxonomic sequence. The Crossley, et al proposal is a good first step. (And I don’t think that anyone would propose using color or habitat as the main ordering criteria. At least, I hope not.)
I will grant that most birders learn taxonomy through field guides. But, and I may be giving more credit than deserved, I think birders will still learn taxonomy even if their field guides aren’t arranged that way. Other books and resources will still use taxonomy as their basis. And field guides could easily include taxonomic notes within family text (if present), or even a visual taxonomic index. That would only take a couple pages.
Oh wow, 11 comments!
@Lindsey: the fact that you are a newer birder – as you state – actually means that you have a lot more to say about this than most of the more experienced birders! Thanks so much for your input!
@Grant: thanks for the link. I wasn’t aware of this interesting article. Yes, finding the ideal “identification order” would be a long and gruesome process that would probably take 2 or 3 generations of field guides. But I think it is possible to find the most useful arrangement. There won’t be the perfect one, but the most useful one. And frankly, yes I can accept separating the males from the females if it aids in identification. Take the ducks for example. It would certainly help to have the drakes and females on separate plates. Of course, you could include miniature images of the respective mate at the plates, so that a person would know that the drake Mallard has a brown female because there’d be a tiny picture of a brown female next to it. Just an outline to point to the female plate.
Why not!? I am being deliberately provocative here but really: do with the birds whatever you will, so long as it improves the usefulness of the field guide.
@Duncan: The problem is that you can’t expect to find anything anywhere in a field guide because taxonomy is changing so fast. Sparrows at the back? The (excellent!) Borneo guide by Susan Myers has them in front of the pipits between the flowerpeckers and the starlings in the middle of the passerines.
That’s one of my key issues with the taxonomic order: it will be different in each field guide you use. Furthermore, there will always be unknown/new bird families if you visit a new region. You will need to learn by heart the order of bird families in each and every book. You’re not done once you’ve learned the current accepted taxonomic order.
@Mark: you are of course right in your first paragraph, but I wasn’t really dishing out blame. I plainly stated that the source of my mistakes was first and foremost my inexperience in the region. And my ego has no problem with being a beginner in a new region. I’d much rather be a beginner in a new regions dripping with lifers than to not be in that region at all! 🙂
Regarding the amount of time for research before the trip: this was a business trip at rather short notice, and time was limited. Furthermore, I concur with your assessment that 5 minutes out in the field are worth more than hours at home. Therefore, I think a field guide should allow an observer to identify birds even without too much research in advance. If I have to learn by heart all the pitfalls and challenges and confusion species before venturing out into the field, then I don’t need a field guide anymore (yes, exaggerated, but a valid point, no?).
I agree that field guides who sort species according to habitat, general colour etc are mostly useless. I also agree that in 9 out of 10 cases, the confusion species will be closely related anyway. My point is that the 10th case, the 1 in 10 where it doesn’t work, should be re-arranged. And it makes more sense to e.g. put the female daggling ducks on one plate and the males on another (as mentioned above). When it comes to field identification, males and females, or immatures and adults, with clearly different plumage could be treated like “different species” within the guide by separating them and arranging them on different plates with different confusion species. Again, very likely these plates would contain closely related species anyway, but it could be more useful than having the different ages and genders on the same plate.
Taxonomy is changing very profoundly, and we are definitely not just looking at splits. The order in which the families are arranged is completely, and let me emphasize the “completely”, different if you are using different field guides. I have given the example of the sparrows in my response to Duncan.
So, what is a field guide for? I think a field guide should be for identifying birds as effectively as possible out in the field, and this pertains to beginners and experts alike. And I maintain that I don’t think the taxonomic order achieves this goal. It definitely is a good and useful starting point, but we need to take it much further.
@Mike: yes, sorting species by colour is possibly even more horrible than by taxonomy. Possibly. 😉
You make a very interesting statement:
“…obscure rather than illuminate the relationships between them all.”
Is it really the function of a field guide to illuminate the RELATIONSHIPS between species? Wouldn’t that be better illuminated in an article or a separate book? I think a field guide is a tool for field identification. Yes, it is true that birders should have a thorough understanding of systematics. However, the first step to comprehend anything about birds is to know which one you’re looking at. If the comprehension of systematics is given priority over allowing easy field identification, I fear nothing is gained.
@David: I was on Borneo and West Java, and thus outside Robson’s area. I used McKinnon & Phillipps’ “Field Guide to the Birds of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali” and the excellent “Birds of Borneo”
by Susan Myers.
I am very much with you and Duncan that, as you state “we’re not birders if we don’t get the natural history perspective that taxonomy brings and can appreciate the underlying (and surprisingly vast) differences in similar looking birds.”
I fully subscribe to that, and learning about taxonomic relationships, and drawing connections to biogeography is something I am enthusiastic about. I just don’t think that a field guide is the place to do that – a field guide is for field identification, in my opinion.
@Corey: hey, what are you doing!? Are you trying to demonstrate that my three-page post could have been conveniently summarized in 3 sentences!? 🙂 🙂
But that is definitely a very fine example to demonstrate my point! Cheers!
@Eric: Well, we don’t have some field guides that do follow taxonomic sequences, and others that don’t everywhere. That may be the case for North America, but not for large parts of the world. for most parts, there are exclusively field guides in varying, differing, taxonomic order.
This entire post is complaining about the fact that the taxonomic order is often in the way of effective field identification.
An example (beyond parrots and falcons):
Why is it that on Java, there are two songbird species that live in the dense undergrowth of forests, have a grey face, streaked underparts and russet brown upperparts, and one is depicted on plate 68 in the field guide, together with related species that don’t look anything like it, and the other one is on plate 74 of the field guide, together with its closest relatives that don’t look anything like it, and there isn’t even a mentioning anywhere that these two could be confused.
Here’s the situation:
I see a small brown bird in a bush with a grey face and striped underparts, but I can’t see the underparts all that clearly. I look it up in my guide and the first plate on which I find a good fit is No. 68. The species depicted on the plate looks very, very much like the one I am seeing, so I am satisfied and convinced of a thorough and critical identification and move on to the next bird of the flock.
Days later, I accidentally find -while browsing through my book- that on plate 74 there is a very similar species and that I should have tried to get a better look at the belly region to differentiate the two. Well, I haven’t as I didn’t know that was important, and therefore I do not know which species I saw out in the field.
What have I learned about the birds of Java?
Are you really trying to convince me that learning one evening at my hotel that there are two unrelated species of brown-backed, speckle-bellied, grey-faced warblers on Java was more important than knowing which of the two I saw in the forest?
Really?
Shouldn’t we place identification before interpretation?
And yes, it is true that taxonomy won’t be as fluid as it is now – but now is the time I want to identify birds with a field guide.
@Grant #2: YES, thumbs up, thanks for your great comment!
Thanks for the considered reply Jochen. Apologies if my comment was overly harsh- on re-reading you did make your motives clearer than I gave credit.
Personally I enjoy the taxonomic structure, and I’d heartily support a publisher with the guts to go where the facts take them in this regard. I’d love to see the falcons and parrots as neighbours (I’ve had a hunch about that one ever since as a kid seeing an escaped budgie in Scotland getting mobbed by starlings as if it were a predator). Bring it on!
@Mark: I didn’t think your comment was overly harsh. I think it was a very balanced and well-written comment that I enjoyed replying to!
As much as you’d love to see the falcons next to the parrots, I’d love
to see the Ioras, Gerygones and female Sunbirds on the same plate in my field guide.
I think the discovery of the close relationship between parrots and falcons was incredible, one of the recent highlights of the taxonomic debate. I’d love to see it mentioned in a field guide. Just not in the “identification” section…
Like some others I don’t think Taxonomy should be completely abandoned. But I do think that we need to pay more attention to the text portion of guides and not only the plates. I found, when traveling, that once I did that I eliminated many errors I was making. Habitat preferences, behaviour and SIMILAR species sections were critical.
But what I really want to know is, is that a Wookie in the background of your photo of the Greater Green Leafbird? Where exactly were you birding?
Jochen,
I share your sentiments. Taxonomy gives us a good starting point as to how to order things; they have to have some order, not just random placement.
And while it is interesting to discover that convergent evolution has obscured distant relationships a la Falcons, the raison d’etre of a field guide is to refer to it when needed. Having memorized more or less where birds are located in a book, if the order keeps changing then one might as well commit the whole thing to memory and negate the need for the field guide – a counter productive effect.
As far as I am concerned, the constant re-ordering is an annoyance and as stated by you counter productive.
On another note, and quality filed guide should have ‘similar species’ as many do, and I for one would like to see more make use of ID tick marks as in the Peterson Guides.
I believe dropping the use of taxonomic order as the standard in field guides would cause chaos among birders with whom it is a common and at least basically unchanging structure. But I would echo and emphasize what the last couple commenters have brought up and suggest that it would have most easily solved Jochen’s problem with the SE Asia guide and the confusing species he saw: All field guides MUST have a thorough SIMILAR SPECIES blurb for each species, including the female. While not placing the similar species on the same plate, it would still point you quickly to any similar birds that need to be distinguished in the field (if hopefully the Similar Species notes include the plate/page number of the referenced species). Angehr’s Birds of Panama does an excellent job of this. (I agree that ID tick marks would also be very helpful.)
I humbly submit that guides should be sorted according to whether a bird is “cool”, “weird looking”, or “some kind of sparrow”.
Seriously tho, I find that modern tools that let you search for birds in a space with lots of parameters like range, habitat, size, shape and coloration are allowing me to spend less time flipping around in a book of any kind. Using a database certainly solves the problem of what arbitrary ordering to use.
@Clare: shhhhhhh! Quiet there! I knew I wasn’t going to fool you, but please, don’t tell the others! You know I am in this year list thing with Corey, and … well … you see I did NOT go to Indonesia, I went to British Columbia instead. But the number of species I saw there was too low to beat Corey this year, so I fabricated a trip to the tropics and chose Indonesia. Now, that picture: it was taken in the mountains east of Vancouver and it shows clear proof of Bigfoot and the New World’s first ever Greater Green Leafbird. Now I am in this dilemma: do I acknowledge the hoax and lose my birder reputation or do I publish the picture of bigfoot for worldwide fame and fortunes?
What would you do!?
@Arie: thanks for the great comment!
@Mary Ann G: yes, a thorough “similar species” section is possibly a very good solution and definitely a necessity regardless of how one sorts the species into a field guide.
You say that dropping taxonomic order would cause chaos. Well, this is true so long as there is a stable taxonomic order. however, at the rate taxonomy is changing now, it is my impression that always using the newest taxonomic order in field guides is causing even more chaos. In some field gudes, the pipits/wagtails are one of the first passerine families, in some they are near the end , in some they are in the middle of the passerines. It can’t get much more chaotic than this!
@ X: You know, if I was a publisher I’d get in contact with you. Hmmmm, yes, maybe electronic field guides would be nice to have: you see a brown bird in Indonesia with stripes on the breast in a forest and type in “brown” “Indonesia” “stripes on breast” and “forest” and … bam … the ID tool creates a “plate” with all possible species matching your parameters.
Interesting!!
I’d go for the fame and fortune, and your own reality TV show on the Discovery Channel “Bigfoot and Birds” and if you can squeeze mermaids in there somewhere as well you’ve got it made!
Overall, I am firmly in the “taxonomic order, yes” camp on this.
The first question is, What is the alternative? For good reason, birder here have debunked the color and habitat schemes. They are hopeless. I can’t think of any other scheme that wouldn’t be completely arbitrary and unwieldy.
The real debate is between “strict taxonomic” order and “modified taxonomic” order, which is what most field guides have used going back to Peterson. That’s where we put similarly “built” birds together, like leaving falcons and vultures with diurnal raptors, and reshuffle certain species to be closer to visually similar ones (all brown thrushes, for example).
Personally — though maybe not if I were a beginner — I slightly favor strict taxonomic. Yes, taxonomic relations are fluid, but then books can change over time to keep up. I think there’s a scientific and pedagogical truthfulness about taxonomic order that’s intrinsically good, and as I think someone else said, learning taxonomy is really part and parcel of learning identification. The first experienced birders look for is usually taxonomic-level: Is it a heron or a pigeon, a duck or a goose?
Questions about add-ons (inserting similar species on a page, for example) are really irrelevant to the question at hand. We all hope a field guide has all the right things, but order is order, and in my book, taxonomy rules!
This post is very old, but I changed my mind and I think you’re right. I was swayed by the emotional upset over taxonomy–sorry. I’m interested in bringing in complete beginners, and I’m realizing how all our conventional birding tools–especially the Sibley book, the Cornell Lab, and Audubon’s online bird guide–are great for people already in the field but totally useless to total, complete beginners who don’t even know silhouettes. Even seasoned birders need a hand in strange places. I would like to lessen the dilemma somehow, especially by field guides devoting a small section to taxonomic relationships (which will be outdated in a month) and otherwise being ultra user-friendly, grouping similar-looking birds like falcons and hawks. And, experts also need their tools–it makes sense for the US to have an advanced Sibley’s guide as well as a line-up of easy to use guides.