Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (second edition)

Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Second Edition)
By Roger Tory Peterson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , 2020

It’s been over a decade since the last opulent, pleasingly heavy Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, and now a new, updated edition has appeared, crammed as usual with hundreds of species of birds in dozens of states of molt, mood, and motion. 

For a long time, the Peterson guides, legendary in the world birdwatching, have gone the extra mile to create a field guide that anticipates every user’s needs: when are you seeing the bird, what season of the year? Where? At what stage in its life or mating excitement? This Peterson guide shows you the bird in flight from directly below - the way so many bird watchers actually see these creatures, but a vantage point almost always missing from lesser guides. 

There are standard bird-book features here as well: colored distribution maps, breakdowns of coloration throughout the year, brief overviews of the various species, and even, occasionally, a stab at that most hopeless of all bird guide endeavors: attempts to render in writing the sound of a bird’s calls. This new edition features many new color plates of the birds of Hawaii, but it naturally includes even the grubbiest, most humble American bird (the House Sparrow, for instance, Passer domesticus, about which we’re told “City birds often sootier than clean country birds”).

And this latest Peterson Guide ends on the most hopeful note imaginable: a Life List, that carefully-updated most personal of personal documents that birders upkeep with Benedictine exactitude throughout their spotting career. Most birders keep their Life List in separate booklet imbued with semi-religious significance, but including one in here is a remarkably cheering end note. 

These big, tough, laminated field guides might themselves be an endangered species, since there’s an entire genera of phone apps that can do field functions only a few shades short of actual sorcery. But as wonderful as such apps are, they don’t live well on the bookshelf, and they’re a cold thing to share with young investigators. For such readers, there will always be joy at the arrival of a new Peterson guide.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.