A Field Guide to Field Guides

And why your phone will never replace them

In our basement is a big ol’ plastic tub known as “the camping box.” We learned a long time ago, after one particularly disastrous camping trip on which we somehow left pretty much every essential item right down to the sleeping bags at home, that we should just pack all our supplies in a tub and store it away. Then, when it was time to go camping, everything would be ready to go.

A few items are always missing, though, because we can’t be without them the rest of the year—including a couple of field guides. We’ve thumbed through them many times, looking for an elusive bird or wildflower or tree, and we always learn something along the way. But field guides seem to be turning into one of those nostalgic items that belong to an earlier time.

On Saturday, I went to a botanical garden near Hartford with three friends, including Vivian, a biologist who’s also a longtime gardener. At the intersection of those two skills, she shared a few interesting bits of information with us, like why a bed of purple petunias was spotted white. (The answer? Apparently, “jumping genes.” Who knew?) What Vivian herself didn’t know, until Saturday, was that she could take a photo of any flower on her phone and touch a button below it (this appears to be an iPhone thing only—it’s more complicated on an Android), and Apple AI (or whatever) would tell her what it was. She was like a kid on Christmas morning, snapping photos with abandon and identifying them with delight, mostly successfully. (At one point, she was informed she had taken a picture of “a plant”).

With that kind of technology at your fingertips, who needs field guides, right?

I do the same thing with my phone. I loaded the Merlin app from Cornell University because I am hopeless at identifying bird calls, and I figured it would help me learn what I’m hearing in the woods. It’s interesting, although it definitely slows down our hikes to stop every ten feet to listen. I haven’t gotten much better at identifying the birds yet, but the app does let you “explore” birds with a search function and even log your own “life list.”

While these are fun features, searching for birds or wildflowers or trees on your phone just isn’t the same as using a good old-fashioned field guide. I like cracking open the book and touching the pages, browsing through the whole array of sea birds, for example, maybe noticing one I’ve never noticed before and stopping to read a bit more. When I’m reading a field guide instead of using an app, I’m part of a long line of nature lovers who’ve zipped their field guides into a backpack for centuries. Well, maybe not the “zipped” part, since a zipper turns out to be a shockingly modern device. But you get the point.

My go-to guide is the National Audubon Society Field Guide to New England because it’s a comprehensive guide to most flora and fauna I’m likely to encounter in my own region. Audubon covers not only the plants and the animals but also geology, the night sky, and several other topics of interest. I have a field guide specific to Long Island Sound on my shelf at work and several field guides in the form of laminated brochures, which I’ll admit do lighten the load. But sometimes you want the extra information you get from a full guide, such as the important note “often escapes garden cultivation,” which I just now read below a picture I’ve flipped past before of Campanula rapunculoides, or common bellflower, a stalk of pretty purple flowers currently blooming in my garden. My great aunt once told me they were weeds, but I’ve let them wander through my garden anyway because I like them, and so far they haven’t caused too much trouble. I’m noting also that the field guide says they bloom in July and August, but mine have been blooming for a couple of weeks now, which is slightly alarming and a topic for another time.

Yes, yes, you can do all this on your app. As Vivian and our other two friends and I stood beside a pond after lunch on Saturday, we noticed an unusual looking bird perched on a low branch. An osprey? No, when it turned its head, we saw it had a long beak and a long neck. Some kind of heron? An odd duck? The magical photo trick works with birds, too, of course, so Vivian whipped out her phone and gave it a try, but the bird was too far away, and the phone informed her that we were in West Hartford, Connecticut. Gee, thanks. Undeterred, Vivian Googled “water birds of Connecticut” and swiped through the options. She was theorizing that what we were gawking at was a bittern.

I irreverently wondered out loud whether we needed to identify the bird at all. At some point, you may come to question whether a field guide is really necessary. Hearing birdsong and seeing wildflowers in the woods or gazing up into a star-filled sky is its own beautiful reward. All a field guide will tell you is the way humans have characterized flowers and trees and birds and fish and stars into our own systems. Like John Muir, a raw nature-lover who took ridiculous risks like edging along a narrow ledge a thousand feet above the Yosemite Valley floor, just to experience the full splendor of Yosemite Falls—and then had nightmares about it later—maybe we should get our heads out of our field guides and just appreciate. (Muir reportedly never brought a field guide into the wilderness with him but did carry Emerson to read under the stars.)

Sometimes, though, the impulse to know is just too strong to ignore. As Vivian had guessed, we eventually determined our mystery bird to be a bittern. Later, at home, I looked up the bittern in my field guide. Turns out it’s part of the heron family, so that idea wasn’t so far off. In addition to the visual characteristics, my guide described the bird as “shy; points bill skyward if disturbed.” In my guide, it kept company on a spread with its fellow herons: the black-crowned night-heron, great egret, great blue heron, snowy egret, and green heron, and an entry on herons in general. Here, the bitterns were described as “shy denizens of marshes with distinct voices.” Unfortunately, our bittern didn’t “uunk-KA-lunk” for us, as the field guide said it might.

If, like me, just thinking about field guides makes you want to crack one open, here’s a little field guide to field guides:

This post by garden writer Margaret Roach includes links to a bunch of interviews she’s done with field guide authors.

From the folks who bring you the Merlin app, here’s a list of field guides (and, yes, a few apps at the end) specific to birds.

Here are ten favorites from The Nature Conservancy, including some very specialized guides.

This comprehensive video from a YouTube channel called Backyard Ecology covers a lot of ground.

And here’s the crowd-sourced list from Goodreads readers.

Do you have a favorite field guide? Tell us about it in the comment section below!