field guides | Birds of New England.com

Photo by Chris Bosak Ablack-capped chickadee grabs a sunflower seed from a Christmas decoration during the winter of 2016-17 in Danbury, Conn.

Gift-giving for birdwatchers has changed so much over the last few years.

It wasn’t long ago that a good field guide was the ideal gift for the birder on your list. The only question was which field guide to get. Sibley, Peterson, Audubon? The field guide debate was always fun to watch from the sidelines as birders extolled the virtues of their favorite. Can it fit in your back pocket? Are they photos or drawings? Does it show the various plumages?

Now, physical field guides have all but been replaced by digital ones on the phone. It happened in the blink of an eye. One year, birders are flipping through the pages of a book trying to confirm a species; the next, they are scrolling through their phones.

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Photo by Chris Bosak
A young Wood Duck sits on a rock at Woods Pond in Norwalk, Conn., Julyh 2016.

Here’s the latest For the Birds column, which runs weekly in The Hour (Norwalk, Conn.), The Keene (NH) Sentinel and several Connecticut weekly newspapers.

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I’ll kick off this bird column with a baseball reference. Why not?

A Major League manager once said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “These guys aren’t doing what their baseball cards say they can do.” He meant that he had a group of players who had had great seasons in the past, but were underperforming that particular year.

Well, the same can be said for birds in field guides. I have mentioned in previous columns that you can’t always trust field guides, just like you can’t always trust the statistics on the back of a baseball card. Some of the newer guides, such as the ones by Sibley and Crossley, are much more trustworthy. The Peterson Continue reading →