The sport of bird-watching in America has been shaped largely by the guidebooks birders use to identify what they see. And the guidebooks have, to a considerable extent, been shaped by the kinds of optical equipment available for use in the field.
His rendering of a male canvasback duck is a prime example of his style. He shows the bird as you would see it sitting on the water, and he captures it beautifully with nothing more than five solid shapes in black, gray, and white: a dark gray bill, a medium gray head, a black chest, a white body, and a black rump. The only detail shown in any of these color blocks is the eye.
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I can report from experience that this minimalist presentation is quite sufficient to identify the bird if you encounter it in the wild. It is also just right for the four-power or six-power binoculars of modest optical quality that most birders were equipped with in the 30s and 40s. Too much detail would make the job of identification seem harder, and most people wouldn’t be able to see it on the birds anyway.
Birders like these, outfitted with the best optical equipment, have no need for patternistic renderings of canvasbacks. They are looking for things such as the article in the new issue of Birding magazine that devotes eight pages of text, photos, paintings, and drawings to the problem of separating the common ground dove from the ruddy ground dove.
Houghton Mifflin is also thinking about the needs of expert birders with excellent optical equipment. As part of their Peterson Field Guide Series, which now includes 41 volumes by various authors on practically everything in the universe, they have published A Field Guide to Advanced Birding by Kenn Kaufman ($14.95, paper).
His treatment of the genus Empidonax is an excellent example of his method. We have 11 species of these small flycatchers in North America. Five are seen regularly around Chicago. To introduce the genus Kaufman says, “They areÉlittle gray birds (tinged with olive, brown, or yellow) with wing bars and eye-rings. Their specific characters are so subtle that there is often more variation within a species than there is between any two species in the genus. Even museum specimens are often difficult to name.”
