Last July I wrote briefly about preview looks at a new bird identification book by photographer Richard Crossley. I liked it. "The Crossley ID Guide to Eastern Birds" is now in bookstores – and on my desk – and I like it even more.
The book is eight inches by 10 inches, 530 pages, and weights 3.5 pounds. It'll cost you $10 per pound, and it's a bargain. There are 20,000 photos in this book, used to give you multiple looks at each species. It's a unique concept that works well for me. Most birds get a full page of photos and text. The photographs of the birds are superimposed on a photo of appropriate habitat. Thus, you see Ruffed Grouse spread across a clearing in a deciduous woods. Pectoral Sandpipers are hunting for grubs in a harvested potato field. The White Pelicans are on or above an inland lake. Most birds are shown in both sexes, perched or standing as well as in flight, near and far, in their varied seasonal plumages.
An early impression in paging through the book was that the illustrations showing the birds at a distance weren't going to be of much use. But, that's often how we see birds. With some practice, many birds can be identified by shape and flight style alone. Crossley says it's a matter of looking rather than seeing. He wants you to look. His book gives you that opportunity. You can use it to prep yourself for actual birding, or to check your field ID calls when you're back at home after a trip or hike.
Crossley's text is well written. It's informative. It avoids the stiff, style-bereft prose almost all other field guides contain. Crossley writes as he most likely speaks, in the vernacular, with a casual tone, and sometimes with a bit of dry humor. I suspect most of us pick up a field guide and dive straightaway into the illustrations. Whatever someone has written in the text that precedes the paintings or photos is of lesser importance. Crossley's text is worth reading. He'll make you a better birder if you do.
A Brit who has lived in New Jersey for the past 20 years, Crossley estimates that he can identify 90 percent of the birds he sees simply by silhouette or as black and white photographs. He breaks field identification clues into – listing in order of importance to him – size, shape, behavior, probability, color, and sound. How many of us, asked to list the clues most important to our ID efforts, would list color and sound last?
The book is intelligently organized, following taxonomic order for the most part, as ID books do, but leaving that path when face-to-face comparisons of similar or related species best serves the reader. For instance, you will find his Purple Finches on the left of a pair of facing pages and House Finches on the right. Spend a couple of minutes here and you should never again confuse one for the other.
I quibbled when first paging through the book, particularly in the warbler and sparrow pages, because I found it difficult to clearly distinguish the birds from the habitat background. That's reality, though, right? There are six Grasshopper Sparrows shown on page 462, and just as in the field, they don't jump out at you. No paintings on a white background, no little arrows, no scribbles of habitat used as design details rather than as ID aids. Not that those are bad things, and not that all of our other ID books are less for his efforts. But it surely works well here.
We've been buried in ID books in recent years, flocks of them descending on book stores, all of them easily recognizable variations on the same theme. Crossley has given us a different kind of ID book, a book much more useful and helpful. He's found a new way to do it. Hurrah and him, and hurrah for us!
