Bookshelf: Wildflower ID

If there's one book we take on walks with us more often than any other, it's a wildflower ID book. After 9 years or so of doing this, the woods are no longer just a big mass of green -- each plant is like an old friend that we're checking in with. When we see something unusual, it jumps out at us. And out comes the ID book.

There are three popular books that cover the flowers of this region well: Newcomb's, Peterson's, and Audubon. Your preference will likely depend on which one you start using first. After learning the Newcomb's system, for example, we find it tedious to ID plants in Peterson's. But we've heard the opposite from folks who started out with Peterson's. And when we recently tested all three books with a couple of Natural Capital readers who happened to be hanging out on our porch, Audubon was a clear favorite. Here's a description of the three books and how they work.

Newcomb's Wildflower Guide (1375 species, 490 pages, some color and some black and white illustrations). The key to Newcomb's ID system is a key: a method of identifying certain characteristics about a plant to help you find it quickly in the book. This requires you to look closely at your plant. First, three questions: 1) the type and number of petals, 2) the position of the leaves, and 3) the basic leaf shape. You're then referred to a page with additional questions specific to the set of plants that you could be looking at. As people who really wanted to learn a lot of plants, we found that the investment in learning this ID system was worth it -- we can find most plants much more quickly with the key than by flipping through other guides, and the hands-on attention required to use the ID helps us get to know the plant. To our porch-based test group, however, the key was completely baffling.

Peterson: A Field Guide to Wildflowers (1293 species, 420 pages, color and black and white illustrations). In the introduction to this field guide, Roger Tory Peterson writes, "if one can master them, keys are the proper formal approach to flower identification. But, I am afraid, most of us belong to the picture-matching school, and it is for this audience our Field Guide has been planned." The flowers are organized first by color. At the beginning of each color section, there are some pages with representative types of flowers, to help you narrow your search. The rest of each section includes black-and-white drawings of many more species, organized by flower shape. As with Newcomb's, descriptions of the species pictured are on each facing page. Our testers' main complaint was that the black-and-white drawings made it more difficult to envision whether the drawing was a good match for the plant they were trying to identify.

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers (658 species, 888 pages, color photographs). Audubon covers half as many species as the other two books, in twice as many pages. With large photographs, only 2 to 3 flowers fit on a page. The species descriptions are also longer; they are in a separate section of the book, which requires some flipping back and forth. Like Peterson's guide, Audubon organizes flowers first by color, then by flower type. The color photographs were a big hit with our testers. And Matt identified a few plants via photographs in here that had been eluding him in the Newcomb's key. As with the bird books we reviewed, however, using photographs can have drawbacks. When a photo is good, you know immediately that you've found the right plant (or a close relative). But for some plants, the photos are limited by focusing only on the flowers; there may be clues in the foliage that are not well illustrated.

The bottom line: The Audubon book seems to be the most appealing to beginners. The photos are nice enough that you may find yourself just browsing through the book, which is a great way to prime yourself to recognize things in the field. But if you want more depth, you may find a book like Newcomb's might also be rewarding, with its much larger coverage of species.

If you want to buy: We got the wildflower books we didn't own from the library to evaluate them, and encourage you to do the same. But if you're ready to buy one, consider supporting The Natural Capital by going through the links in this post -- or use this little store we set up to mirror our own bookshelf of nature books. We'll get a tiny cut off anything you buy there. We also thought it would be a help to Natural Capital readers to set up that virtual bookshelf just so folks could see which books we've found useful. Of course, you're free to buy any of them wherever you like!

Bookshelf: Bird ID

You would think not much could change in the world of identifying birds. The birds themselves don't change. But I still have my mother's copy of Peterson's Field Guide (2nd edition), complete with her parent's phone number on the inside front cover and notes from her college ornithology class in the margins. And I will tell you, we've come a long way from the days of those mostly black-and-white plates.

In this post, we'll review three current field guides to birds in our area. As a case study, we'll use a bird that was an occasional visitor to our condo's flower boxes in Dupont Circle: the house finch.

Peterson Field Guides: Birds of Eastern and Central North America (probably about 600 birds, 450 pages): This guide covers the birds you might expect to see in the US and Canada from the east coast all the way west to Texas and North Dakota. The shot to the right is from Matt's copy, which is a 4th edition; the 5th edition fixes one of our pet peeves about the book by adding small maps to each entry to show each bird's range. This makes it much easier to quickly exclude the birds whose range doesn't even come close to the DC area when trying to make an ID. The text is minimal, but provides basic descriptions of distinguishing visual characteristics, song, and habitat. The strength of Peterson's is that it typically shows at least 4 species on a single page; this allows for side-by-side comparison of similar species. In most cases the illustrations are clear. However, for several years, we had trouble applying the distinctions between the illustrations of the house finch (top right corner) and the purple finch (below it) to the birds we saw in front of us, and had an ongoing debate over which bird we were seeing.

The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (650 birds, 432 pages): Sibley's covers about the same range as Peterson's, but makes several nice additions to the Peterson model. They still manage to fit about four birds to each two page spread, but by making the illustrations smaller, there is room for more information. Each description starts off with where you are likely to find each bird, which goes a long way toward settling our purple finch ("uncommon in woody and brushy areas") vs. house finch ("common and widespread in suburbs") dispute. The written descriptions of visual characteristics are associated with arrows to the relevant part of each illustration; this is much easier to follow than Peterson's method of stringing them together in a paragraph. Another nice bonus is a short section at the beginning of each group of birds (e.g. wading birds, raptors) with general information and comparing the genera or species within the group. Unfortunately, these sections don't really stand out as breaks; it's easy to skip over them as you're flipping through the guide.

Smithsonian Handbooks: Birds of the Mid-Atlantic (328 birds, 400 pages): This guide focuses on a smaller geographic range (VA/WV through NY/NJ), and thus has room for a full page per bird. The benefit of this approach is much richer information about each bird, including notes on behavior, breeding, nesting, flight patterns, and what they're attracted to in bird feeders. The downside is that you lose the ability to compare birds side-by-side: you have to turn a page between our purple finch and house finch (we pasted them together here). The book tries to make up for this by including a small inset on each page about similar birds, but it's not as easy to use. This guide uses photographs instead of illustrations, which is helpful in the case of our finches. If the pictures are accurate, it's clear we never saw a purple finch at our flower boxes. In general, the photos are a mixed bag: some more difficult-to-photograph birds are a little blurry or in odd poses. And the photo of the great egret, a pure white bird, looks largely grey from a shadow. Failing to at least Photoshop that shot seems like a major oversight. One other drawback in this guide is that unlike the other two books, there's no label like "hawks" or "ducks" in the upper corners of the pages to help you flip to the right general area as you narrow down your search for a bird.

Bottom line: I think it might be time for us to move beyond Peterson's. Sibley's gained another edge last week when it was the only book of these three that clearly identified a juvenile starling (which is grey, instead of black like the adults). It had a clear picture and also an apt description of it "waddling," which was a clincher for my confidence that I had made the right ID. But I keep going back to the Smithsonian book, as well, for the longer descriptions.

Do you have a favorite field guide? What do you like about it? Click below to leave a comment.