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Pixels, Print, Potentials: Endangered Genres?
A review by Rick Wright
Birding Trails: Montana, by Chuck Robbins
Sandhill Crane Press, 2014
508 pages, $29.95—softcover
ABA Sales / Buteo Books 1365MT
The Robertson and Woolfenden Florida Bird Species: An Annotated List, by Jon S. Greenlaw, Bill Pranty, and Reed Bowman
Florida Ornithological Society, 2014
435 pages, $24—softcover
There’s a good chance that I will live to see the extinction of the print field guide. No triumphant e-usurper has arrived yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and not much time at that, before some clever spirit figures out how to repackage all the identification material we’re used to into a digital resource that finally puts the good old codex out of its lingering misery. What it will look like, I don’t know—no one does—but it will be even more new and even more wondrous than anything that flashed onto the birderly horizon in 1934 or 1983 or 2000.
Many of the ancillary resources in the birder’s library have already undertaken a successful migration to digital “platforms.” A wide range of site guides, breeding bird atlases, and lists of all kinds are now available, conveniently or even exclusively, as “apps” or online files fruitfully incorporating texts, images, and audio elements. Unlike the field guide and all its complexities, reference works like these combine their multimedia richness with, in most cases, a certain simplicity of presentation and clarity of intention, making the transfer from print to pixel relatively straightforward for authors, designers, and—most important of all—readers.
Even for these and related text types, though, the bound paper-and-ink book persists. Two recently published titles, an annotated list covering one of the ABA Area’s birdiest regions and a bird-finding guide to a vast and vastly underbirded state, are the occasion to ask why—and to wonder whether there is still any reason at all for such things to appear in print.
Montana is a really big place. The fourth-largest state in the union, it stretches more than 500 miles east to west, the axis along which I-90 takes most visitors across the state. If Montana is simply on your way to someplace else, that long drive can be daunting, exhausting; but the birder fortunate enough to stay a while will discover an impressive wealth of habitats, from the eastern prairies with their Sprague’s Pipits and Baird’s Sparrows to tundra and mountain forests haunted by rosy-finches and Boreal Owls.
Just the sort of place that needs a good bird-finding guide.
Chuck Robbins’s hefty Birding Trails Montana—one in a new series of bfg’s from Sandhill Crane Press—introduces readers to something like 240 sites across the state, more than half of which the author has visited himself. The entries, all extremely brief, are flashy on the page, with colorful “icons” and, in many cases, full-page but frustratingly small-scale maps reproduced from a variety of sources. Each site is identified by its latitude and longitude; a short list of so-called “key” birds and an indication of the site’s seasonality are followed by a concise paragraph or two of general description, touching variously on habitat features, facilities, and routes and trails.
Obviously, to fit all this—plus a large number of poorly reproduced color photographs—into 500 printed pages requires considerable abridgment. So much abridgment, in fact, that every site account resembles, in its cheerful design and its lack of informational depth, the entry page of an app or website.
Only here, you can’t click through to find out more.
We spent most of May this year on a cross-continental drive, visiting family and sneaking in a little birding when we could. Montana takes up a large part of the route connecting New Jersey and British Columbia, and we looked forward to using the new guide as we explored new sites and re-acquainted ourselves with old favorites.
But we didn’t use it. At all. The startling omission of an endpaper map of the state made it impossible to remember whether we were at any point in, say, “Glacier Country” or “Yellowstone Country,” and the index is cluttered to the point of uselessness: absent the otherwise customary appendix treating rarities and specialties, that index led us to 14 widely scattered pages for Great Gray Owl, 22 for Sprague’s Pipit—and that only after I figured out to look the former up under “G,” the latter under “P.”
Or rather it would have led us to those pages, had it not been so much easier, so much faster, and so much more productive just to click over to eBird and its “hotspot explorer” or to Montana Audubon’s birding pages or to the ABA’s Birding News. Detailed maps and directions, up-to-the-minute bird lists, weather reports, road conditions: all at the touch of a fingertip, and no paper cuts.
Not even the most carefully compiled and ingeniously designed of the paper bird-finding guides out there can compete. It would take a book far heavier even than this one to provide the information that a genuinely digital, continuously updated bfg could offer. To my mind, there is simply no reason to continue printing books like this, when an e-platform can so readily accommodate masses of easily navigable text and graphics. Anything left out, such as the location of the restrooms Robbins promises along southwest Montana’s Burma Road, could be quickly added, and the visiting birder would be free to select her own target species, rather than relying on someone else’s highlighting of Killdeer, Song Sparrows, and Barn Swallows. Digital maps are “zoomable,” and significant sightings could be registered and uploaded immediately. For these purposes, the printed and bound book offers no advantage outweighing these digital conveniences.
We have the technology.
===
Questions of media change and information retrieval are addressed head-on in the introduction to The Robertson and Woolfenden Florida Bird Species: An Annotated List, produced by three of Florida’s best-known and most active birders.
It is not enough to post photographs on the [i]nternet, as such sites are extremely perishable over time.
Instead (and not, regrettably, “in addition”), in a heroic effort to preserve as much as possible of the documentation behind Florida’s 514-species bird list, the authors copied several thousand photographs,
along with PDFs of many publications included in the Literature Cited section, using BPA (Bill Pranty Archive) catalogue numbers. We have placed all such images and files onto flash drives
deposited at four regional institutions and organizations, where presumably those data will remain available for consultation to researchers in the future, provided, of course, that they can still read the flash drives.
In a publishing environment where such recently cutting-edge devices as compact disks and 3-inch floppies are already choking on the dust of obsolescence, it is clearly foolhardy to expect perpetuity from any data carrier or e-service provider. The bound book, on the other hand, has a 1500-year record of survival, and I sympathize greatly with the authors’ decision to place this “baseline” list, the first published for Florida in a quarter century, firmly between two paper covers.
There is a vast amount of information here. It is worth pointing out, though, as the authors do, that this is not a state avifauna, but an admirably painstaking compilation of the evidence—physical, written, and photographic—for the occurrence of every species of bird reported in Florida since Ponce de Léon, backed up with more than 60 pages of literature citations.
It’s all great for an odd moment’s browsing, an activity still far more comfortably pursued in a bound book than on any screen. Especially weird and especially delightful are the accounts in Appendix B, devoted to the more than 200 species released into Florida’s wilds that have not (yet) established apparently persistent breeding populations.
Most readers will be as surprised as I was to learn that free-flying bean geese of undetermined species have actually produced young in Florida, or that captive Aplomado Falcons are regularly used to harass waxwings and other frugivores over the state’s blueberry farms. With six species recorded, hornbill identification in Florida is not the simple matter one might expect, and it seems that a careful eye is needed to sort out the state’s aracari records, too. The clear, comprehensive discussion of exotic birds that introduces this appendix is essential reading for records committees and any birder interested in how and why humans continually put birds where we think we want them.
As Bradford Torrey famously put it, there’s “a world of good reading in a checklist,” and this one is no exception. But lists, like this one, are also meant to be used; however entertaining they may be, they are intended in the first instance as reference works. Unfortunately, the layout and design of Florida Bird Species work against the researcher’s interest in efficient access to the information it contains.
The running headers remain the same across all 434 pages, making it impossible to tell which of the four separate lists you’ve landed in on opening the book. Once the reader has arrived in the correct species account, he will find the citations of specimens and photographs confusing, the punctuation an illogical jumble of colons, semicolons, and commas. There is frustration, too, in the unwieldy length of the index, which for some reason gives the English names of birds twice, “Silvery-cheeked Hornbill” and “Hornbill, Silvery-cheeked,” for example, not always directing the reader to the same pages each time. The bibliography, invaluable as it is, would also be more compact and user-friendly without the extra spaces following some of the periods and the excessive and unattractive length of the hanging indents—it all adds up.
Note that those are all “codex problems,” lapses and errors sadly conspicuous in a printed book but that would disappear if this important work were made available on line (or, for that matter, on a flash drive) as a true e-book. Again and again as I read, I felt the urge to search for a bit of related data in other species accounts; again and again, I failed to find it easily on the paper-and-ink page, while it would have been possible at nearly the speed of light in a digital book. Not only could lists of specimens and photographs be presented with greater graphic clarity, but images could be easily linked to the citations. And the bibliography could be continuously brought up to date, with each citation leading, if not to the text of the book or paper itself, at least to the website of an institution that holds the printed document.
Yes, I might sometimes miss being able to sit down and thumb, with my actual thumb, through the pages, the actual printed pages. But there is a difference between reading a book and using it—and in the search for mere facts, fast, efficient digital resources already beat the printed codex hands down.
– Rick Wright is the Book Review Editor at Birding and a leader at Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. He lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with his wife, Alison Beringer, and their chocolate lab, Gellert.
Recommended citation:
Wright, R. 2015. Pixels, Print, Potentials: Endangered Genres? [a review of Birding Trails: Montana, by Chuck Robbins, and The Robertson and Woolfenden Florida Bird Species: An Annotated List, by Jon S. Greenlaw, Bill Pranty, and Reed Bowman]. Birding 47 (3): 67.
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2015/06/pixels-print-potentials-endangered-genres.html
