Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides
by Spencer Schaffner
From the publisher (University of Massachusetts Press):
From meadows to marshlands, seashores to suburbs, field guides help us identify many of the things we find outdoors: plants, insects, mammals, birds. In these texts, nature is typically represented, both in words and images, as ordered, clean, and untouched by human technology and development. This preoccupation with species identification, however, has produced an increasingly narrow view of nature, a “binocular vision,” that separates the study of individual elements from a range of larger, interconnected environmental issues. In this book, Spencer Schaffner reconsiders this approach to nature study by focusing on how birds are presented in field guides.
Starting with popular books from the late nineteenth century and moving ultimately to the electronic guides of the current day, Binocular Vision contextualizes birdwatching field guides historically, culturally, and in terms of a wide range of important environmental issues. Schaffner questions the assumptions found in field guides to tease out their ideological workings. He argues that the sanitized world represented in these guides misleads readers by omitting industrial landscapes and so-called nuisance birds, leaving users of the guides disconnected from environmental degradation and its impact on bird populations.
By putting field guides into direct conversation with concerns about species conservation, environmental management, the human alteration of the environment, and the problem of toxic pollution, Binocular Vision is a field guide to field guides that takes a novel perspective on how we think about and interact with the world around us.
I’m not sure I’m going to buy some of the author’s conclusions, but I suppose I should withhold judgment until I read more than the first chapter! Regardless, I have the feeling that I’ll never look at a field guide in the same way after I finish this book.
Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding has long been a required book for anyone wanting to come to grips with gulls, flycatchers, and other difficult-to-identify groups of North American birds. New this month is a new, updated edition – Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding.
Any book by Kaufman is worth reading, especially one on bird identification. I’m in the process of going through it now, but in the meantime, you can get a look into it at Avian Review and The Birdbooker Report. There’s also a fantastic interview with Kaufman on the BirdWatching magazine blog.
2011 has the makings of a great year for bird books. It’s just the end of January and there are already several that I’m anxiously awaiting. Here’s a little of what we have to look forward to.
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I always look forward to getting the latest field guide. I like to see what new features and innovations the authors have incorporated. In that regard, this year’s new North American field guide – The Crossley ID Guide – will be a doozy. Crossley’s digitally created plates, incorporating photos of birds from many different angles and distances, are groundbreaking. Hopefully they will be useful as well.
February 21, 2011; Princeton University Press
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I generally enjoy “big year” books, so Extreme Birder: One Woman’s Big Year caught my eye. The author, Lynn Barber, is an ABA board member, and contributor to their blog.
March 19, 2011; TAMU Press
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Hawks at a Distance: Identification of Migrant Raptors is Jerry Liguori’s followup to his excellent Hawks from Every Angle. According to the book’s description, this will be “the first volume to focus on distant raptors as they are truly seen in the field”. Sounds like a must-have for any hawk watcher.
March 30, 2011; Princeton University Press
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Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding has long been a required book for anyone wanting to come to grips with gulls, flycatchers, and other difficult-to-identify groups of North American birds. I’m sure his updated Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding will be just as indispensable.
April 19, 2011; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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After the Crossley guide, Peter Goodfellow’s Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build is probably the book I’m most looking forward to this year. How birds are able to build such marvelous structures has always been a mystery to me. I’ve been waiting a long time for a book that could explain and demonstrate the process. Hopefully that wait will be over shortly.
May 26, 2011; Princeton University Press
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Just today I ran across this title – Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides. The title piqued my curiosity; I had to find out what this was about. The publisher’s catalog says:
By putting field guides into direct conversation with concerns about species conservation, environmental management, the human alteration of the environment, and the problem of toxic pollution, Binocular Vision is a field guide to field guides that takes a
novel perspective on how we think about and interact with the world around us.
As someone who loves bird books and books about bird books, this sounds interesting to me.
July 31, 2011; University of Massachusetts Press
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Arctic Autumn: A Journey to Season’s Edge
is the third book in Pete Dunne’s series on season and place. The first two were great, but I’d be excited regardless because it’s Pete freakin’ Dunne!
September 21, 2011; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Last, but certainly not least, is the final volume in the landmark series – Handbook of the Birds of the World, Volume 16. This will be “the first work to verbally and visually portray each member of an entire Class of the Animal Kingdom”. I’m especially excited due to the families covered: Tanagers, Cardinals, Buntings and New World Sparrows, and New World Blackbirds.
October, 2011; Lynx Edicions
For the fourth straight year there’s a new photographic field guide to North American birds. This latest one is by the well-known and highly regarded husband and wife duo of Donald and Lillian Stokes. I haven’t had a chance to really delve into it yet, but so far it’s pretty impressive. I’m planning on doing something different to give everyone a good look at it, but in the mean time, check out the reviews at 10,000 Birds and Birding is Fun!. There’s also a fantastic interview with the authors.
If you’re anxious to get a copy, you can enter to win one through the 10,000 Birds Conservation Club. And if you don’t luck out there, be on the lookout here for a giveaway.
A while back, I wrote about a promising looking field guide that Richard Crossley was working on. Since then, Princeton University Press has announced that they will publish The Crossley ID Guide.
The guide isn’t coming out until next year, but some details have already been released, and now I really can’t wait to get my eyes on this thing. There are some excerpts and a great video interview with Crossley at Barnes and Noble.
It should be interesting, to say the least.
by David Allen Sibley
September 15, 2009; $39.95
Nine years ago, The Sibley Guide to Birds was published and quickly became generally regarded as the best North American field guide. And now Sibley turns his tremendous talent to a very different group of organisms.
The Birder’s World magazine blog has an excellent multi-part interview with Sibley. In it, he discusses why trees, the process of creating the guide, why birders will enjoy it, and much more. It’s a fascinating interview, and made me really look forward to the guide. Amazon
also has a video interview.
I’m very excited about this, since I’ve been telling myself for some time that I need to learn trees better.
by Joseph M. Forshaw
I love trogons, and the description of this new book left me drooling:
This is the definitive natural history of the spectacularly beautiful tropical birds known as the trogons, a family that includes the legendary Resplendent Quetzal, the sacred bird of the ancient Mayans and Aztecs. A collaboration between renowned ornithologist Joseph Forshaw and eminent bird artist Albert Gilbert, Trogons combines science and art to create an unprecedented picture of a threatened bird family. Forshaw’s text provides the most authoritative and comprehensive account of the trogons ever written, and Gilbert’s stunning paintings are the first to accurately depict all species of trogons in their natural habitats and true colors. The book’s detailed synthesis of current knowledge about the trogons is enriched by Forshaw’s personal field observations in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Americas, while Gilbert’s meticulous artwork is based on fieldwork in the same areas. With its large format, more than 40 full-color plates, and state-of-the-art five-color printing, this limited-edition book promises to become a classic and a collector’s item.
However, there are some over at BirdForum that were leery of the artwork. After seeing a couple of sample plates, I can see why.
But I went ahead and ordered it anyway. The trogons are one of my favorite families, and I couldn’t resist. Additionally, this is a limited edition, with only 700 copies available in the U.S. and another 700 for the rest of the world. I hope publishers don’t read this, but I’m a sucker for limited editions.
As soon as I get this, I’ll post my initial thoughts as soon as I can. But in the meantime, if you think you will eventually want a copy, I would suggest ordering it sooner rather than later. Amazon currently shows only one left in stock. I have no idea if they will be receiving any more. But given how much it costs, I wouldn’t blame anyone from holding off until they can see it first!
I’ve been pretty busy lately and haven’t had enough time to write reviews. I’m hoping that will change soon. But in the meantime, here are some thoughts on some recently published bird books.
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Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds
Olivia Gentile
This is an excellent biography of uber-birder and lister Phoebe Snetsinger. I have already written a review of Birding on Borrowed Time, Phoebe’s memoir, and I was curious to see how this biography would compare. Briefly, in just about every regard, I consider this bio as superior. I would recommend starting with it.
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Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience
Jeremy Mynott
My favorite bird book from last year was The Life of the Skies. I’m less than 50 pages into Birdscapes, but so far it reminds me very much of Life of the Skies. It may touch upon some of the same subjects, but it’s really the way that it makes you question things, and really think. I’m going to make a bold prediction and say that this may be my frontrunner for favorite book of 2009 – I’m enjoying it that much so far.
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Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds
Donald Kroodsma
Kroodsma’s The Singing Life of Birds
is fantastic, and should be required reading for anyone interested in bird song. This book, which is a celebration of birdsong from January to December, looks like it could be just as good.
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Flyaway: How A Wild Bird Rehabber Sought Adventure and Found Her Wings
Suzie Gilbert
A verteran bird rehabber chronicles her experiences with injured birds. This looks like an interesting story, all the more so because it’s a subject that is underrepresented in birding literature.
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National Geographic Complete Birds of the World
This guide presents an account for each of the world’s bird families, similar to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds
. I’ve only had a chance to skim through this one, but my initial impression is that if, given the choice, I’d take the one from Princeton.
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The Travails of Two Woodpeckers: Ivory-Bills and Imperials
Noel F. R. Snyder, David E. Brown, Kevin B. Clark
I believe the title says it all. Snyder has written books on several other extinct and endangered species, and I’m interested in his take on these two.
This book, by Andrew Nikiforuk, is available for free as a pdf download. You need to hurry, though, it’s only available through March 20 (that’s tomorrow, as I write this).
This is a very important, and controversial, issue that directly impacts birds and other wildlife, and indirectly affects every living thing on this planet. Here is some more information on the book:
Canada has one third of the world’s oil source; it comes from the bitumen in the oil sands of Alberta. Advancements in technology and frenzied development have created the world’s largest energy project in Fort McMurray where, rather than shooting up like a fountain in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the sticky bitumen is extracted from the earth. Providing almost 20 percent of America’s fuel, much of this dirty oil is being processed in refineries in the Midwest. This out-of-control megaproject is polluting the air, poisoning the water, and destroying boreal forest at a rate almost too rapid to be imagined. In this hard-hitting book, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands and argues forcefully for change.
The Boreal Songbird Initiative has further information about the book and the giveaway.
Princeton has just published a wonderful Encyclopedia of Birds. I just wanted everyone to be aware that it appears to be a softcover version of the 2003 Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds.
I do not know if it has been updated in any way, but from a quick glance it looks the same. I think it’s safe to say that if you already have the Firefly edition, then you can skip the new one. But if you don’t, then go for the Princeton, unless you have a strong preference for hardcover binding or you can find the Firefly for significantly less.
Either way you go, this encyclopedia is fantastic!
