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Posted by Bill Pranty on 00:25:29 02/26/07
In Reply to: Re: birdie bling at the beach-pic here posted by Vince Lucas
VL: Scary. Very scary.
The flag is in shadow, but it looks red to me, FWIW. Hopefully Tricia saw the flag in good lighting or has other pix.
The full combo looks to me like silver, green dash red flag, yellow, red (or orange?). (This reflects my Florida Scrub-Jay bias of reading right leg-left leg. Researchers of most other birds read left leg-right leg).
As for the specialty guides, I've seen very few birds in the past 20 years that I could not identify because of _short-comings of my field guides_. (I'm excepting gulls here, since, really, nobody knows what most of them are ...). My first Ruff (Zellwood 1986) had about 15 of us stumped until somebody pulled out a Master Guide that had a photo that was a miror-image of our bird.
Otherwise, birds go unidentified because of poor or brief looks or a lack of knowledge of the observer. Rarely is a non-ID the "fault" of a field guide. And the most-recent field guides to have been published -- especially the phenomenal new National Geographic, which came out in December -- are light-years ahead of those published even 10 years ago.
Who realized that there are two different Willet populations in Florida, and that our breeders are not found in North America during winter? I sure didn't.
I own several specialty guides -- four of parrots (all of which are deficient in some way), I love Munias and Mannikins by Restall (even though it's not really an identification guide -- most Lonchuras can't be identified in juvenal plumage), and the Garrett/Dunn warblers book is astounding -- but one certainly doesn't need a shorebird guide to identify a Piping Plover.
I think there's too much emphasis on buying a library of bird guides when oftentimes all that is needed is more field work, or hanging around a few more-experienced birders.
FWIW, for somebody looking to buy another bird guide, you could do no better than the new Geo 5. (And no, I have no financial relationship with that book ... wish I did).
Best regards,
Bill Pranty
Bayonet Point, Florida
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