North Coast Diaries

Two recently acquired field guides

Here are my impressions of a couple field guides that came in the mail yesterday

Insects of the Pacific Northwest. 2006. Peter and Judy Haggard. Timber Press, Portland.

Encyclopedia of Tracks and Scat. 2004. Len McDougall. Lyon Press, Guilford, CT.

Timber Press is usually pretty dependable when it comes to producing regional field guides and Peter and Judy Haggard's new insect guide certainly qualifies as a nice little regional field guide. When placed in a head-to-head against the Lone Pine analog Bugs of Oregon and Washington it wins hands down (Lone Pine can be pretty hit-or-miss ranging from the indispensable Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast and Amphibians of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia to the down right useless Birds of the Pacific Northwest Coast).

Where Bugs comes in at 160 pages with only one critter per page illustrated competently by Ian Sheldon, Insects comes in at 295 pages with photographs of several species per page. The front 20% is beetles, easily the most comprehensive and useful section. It includes many of my favorites (Calligrapha multipunctata, Ellychnia hatchi) though Rain beetles (Pleocoma) and the snail-eating Scaphinotus are curiously absent....

The Lep section is the largest section and includes plenty of caterpillars. The overly linear may find the sorted-by-size format that mixes the moths with the butterflies and discards taxonomic formalities
a bit frustrating. There is, however, a key at the front that most non-entemologists will have no trouble using to navigate the text since we have no expectations about what the order should be.

The most interesting section has photos of insect galls from wasps and gall midges. Dragonflies, true flies and most aquatic species (mayflies, stoneflies, etc) are woefully under represented. The non-insect invertebrates section seems almost tacked on as an after-thought.

I'm sure that entemology purists will find plenty to complain about, just as ornithology purists complain about what's missing in bird guides and botany purists complain about omissions in plant guides, but for the rest of us- a regional guide with at least 100 beetle photographs will prove to be well worth buying.

---

McDougal's Tracks and Scat, however, was a major disappointment. One presumes that a work with the word "encyclopedia" in it would live up to its subtitle, "a comprehensive guide to trackable animals in the United States and Canada". It certainly covers plenty of animals, but it's hardly comprehensive. There are very few photos and most of them are of poor quality and difficult to make out details. The black-and-white drawings of various species are done in a style that's so amateurish that some of the drawings are laugh-out-loud funny (the bobcat and wolverine are particularly sad). The track drawings are better than the animal drawings, but I would argue that Ian Sheldon's back-pocket guide Animal Tracks of Washington and Oregon (1997 Lone Pine Press) is a much better (and less expensive) reference if one is looking for a straight animal track guide.

Perhaps most annoying is that even though the word scat is in the title, there are only a couple of photos of scat and a couple of crappy drawings. The "comprehensive" descriptions of scat for most species amounts to a couple sentences that do next to nothing to help the tracker differentiate cats from dogs from mustellids. It is in this regard that one feels most egregiously ripped off.

So, don't be fooled. Leave this book on the shelf and let it go quietly out of print....

Dusty old book of the month: Hawks of North America

With new books on Natural History coming out every day, it's easy to over look references of the past, many of which contain information and perspective rarely included in new material. These older classic texts, written in the late-19th and early-20th century, are well worth owning and stand up well against modern reference materials. This is the first entry in what will theoretically be a continuing series on nature works of the past.

This month's entry is John Richard May's 1935 work The Hawks of North America produced by the "National Association of Audubon Societies".

Modern works on specific bird groups usually fall into regional field guides that focus on identification or world-wide compilations that may include ecological and biological information, but suffer from a lack of regional familiarity and, arguably, too much information packed into too tight a space. The focus on identification in modern works is an artifact of the growing birdwatcher demographic where figuring out what a bird is is all too often the be-all end-all of the outdoor experience. Natural history is often given short-shrift and, when provided, is often written in a terse, no-nonsense style that is more like reading a dictionary than a work of prose.

One of the things that separates what I call pre-Peterson field guides from those we might call the "modern era" guides is the approach to species accounts and this is well illustrated in May's Hawks. May's work stands on the cusps of the change in style for field guides. The illustrations of hawks in flight are actually by Roger Tory Peterson, signed with his early "arts and crafts" block style. But the illustrations provided with the species accounts are by the great Allan Brooks in his far more naturalistic, composition-trumps-field-marks style.

Each species account begins in a way that is typical of early field guides. It is a relaxed personal account of the author's experiences with the species, sprinkled with anecdotes from other experienced observers. The writing style is chock full of adjectives and compound sentences. No effort is made to economize space or modify the author's voice into something more homogenous. We know exactly how May feels about hawks. He is decidedly pro-raptor, but understands the concerns of those who may feel differently. He suggest that referring to Red-tailed Hawks as "Hen Hawk" is a "sentence to death without a fair trial." He pleads for the protection of White-tailed Kites extolling in italics for emphasis:

"An earnest and immediate effort should be made to arouse public opinion, through education, to save the pitiful remnant of this beautiful species before it has completely vanished...."

One doesn't find this kind of passion in modern species accounts and while that may make them seem more objective, it also makes them less readable.

But May doesn't skimp on the just-the-facts natural history. Each account is further broken down into the then recognized subspecies. A written description of each is provided. Range maps are included. The feeding habits are well documented with anecdotal accounts of prey species taken and quantitative tables showing stomach content analysis of collected specimens. There is a level of detail here that one simply does not see in modern works- in part because this older narrative form is out of style and wouldn't even necessarily occur to modern authors.

The species accounts also include colloquial names for each species. Red-shouldered Hawk, for example, is also known as Singing Hawk and Northern Harriers (Marsh Hawks) are also called Bog-trotters by some. Having a source for these often forgotten regional epithets is an important cultural component that even Peterson included in the earliest versions of his field guides, but later dropped when "standardized English vernacular" became the rule.

So, if you are genuinely thinking of becoming a birder for the long haul- someone likely to own more than a half-dozen bird books- John Richard May's Hawks of North America should be close to the top of your books-to-find list at your local used-book emporium.

Modern Hawk-watchers bibliography-

Clark, W.S. and B.K. Wheeler. 1987. Hawks (Peterson Field Guide). Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.

Dunne, P., D. Keller and R. Kochenberger. 1984. Hawk Watch: a guide for beginners. Cape May Bird Observatory, Cape May, NJ.

Dunne, P., D. Sibley and C. Sutton. 1988. Hawks in Flight. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.

Ligouri, J. 2005. Hawks from Every Angle. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Wheeler, B.K. 2003. The Wheeler Guides to Raptors (split into east and west). Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Wheeler, B.K. and W.S. Clark. 1995. Photographic Guide to North American Raptors. Academic Press, London.

Yes, I'm sure but I still don't think I'll count them....

This has been an odd winter, at least odd when compared to the most recent 25-year average. We saw record rainfall in December and record cold, including about 8 inches of snow in January. This is not what we've come to expect from the normally temperate Oregon North Coast.

Ocean temperatures have also been (at least according to local surfers and the data buoy off the Columbia River) much colder than the 25-year average. Weather buoys north and south of the Columbia River buoy are off line, but the Scripp's Buoy at Gray's Harbor and temperature data from the Seaside Aquarium seem closer to normal and suggest that the cold water phenomenon at the Columbia River buoy may be localized.

Why should we care about all this water temperature data? Well, beginning in mid-February we started noticing an increase in deceased birds washing up on local beaches. Most were RHINOCEROS AUKLETS which routinely wreck in late winter along the coast, but among them was an increase in HORNED PUFFIN wash-ups. Rhino numbers peaked in late-February and at around the same time 2 MOTTLED PETRELS and 2 THICK-BILLED MURRES were found. Anytime you get a spike in weird species, the natural impulse is to look for correlations with other things going on in the ocean...thus, an interest in water temperatures.

Given that deep-pelagic species have been turning up dead on the beach and the ocean water temperatures have been running cold in the area, one might anticipate an increased likelihood that live deep sea species could be seen from shore. The circumstances seem proper

On March 6, amid a remarkable number of Rhinoceros Auklets at Silver Point, south of Cannon Beach, I saw a murre fly by which in the 10 seconds or so that I had it in my scope appeared to be a Thick-billed Murre.

While the bird was seen in good light and for a sufficient amount of time, it was 1/2 a kilometer away and moving.

The next day, I went to the North Jetty of the Columbia River and did a seawatch for about an hour. There were remarkable numbers of BLACK-LEGGED KITTIWAKES as well as Rhinoceros Auklets, Common Murres and other ocean species. I picked up a kittiwake in my scope which showed a uniformly dark mantle and dusky underwings, the field marks for a RED-LEGGED KITTIWAKE. I followed it for at least 15 seconds as it flew east along the South Jetty at least 3 km away.

In the space of 2 days I had seen two species that I have never seen before... alive.

But all ocean flyby ID's, particularly those made at some distance should, rightly, be met with some skepticism. There is plenty of room for error and no real mechanism for checking your work. Statisticians use what is referred to as the 95% certainty rule when evaluating whether an observation can be trusted with confidence. 95% is actually a pretty high bar, many of the choices we make every day are made from confidence levels that are arguably much lower, but 95% or better is a good place to keep your operational mindset when trying to identify things that have the potential to be of significant interest to others.

Unfortunately, there is no clean, mathematical way to calculate the confidence value for my two observations, so I'm stuck in the squishy, hard to explain world of "what would Darwin do?" that place in your heart where you make choices based on personal values rather than hard data....

So, after weighing the pluses and the minuses... conditions favorable for rare pelagics to occur, dead rare pelagics recently reported, multiple fieldmarks consistant with the ID vs. seen from a distance, single observer, no mechanism for replication, I can set the following confidence limits: I am confident enough of these observations to report them to a (presumably) interested birding community. I'm confident enough about these observations to send them off to the records committee and let them choose which records pile to file them in. If I had already seen a wild, living, breathing Thick-billed Murre or Red-legged Kittiwake, I'd probably count these as year-birds or even first State birds, but I am not confident enough in these observations to have them represent the first I've ever personally seen, alive and wild. I can't justify putting them on my lifelist.

I'm still young, I can wait for better data.