Word: field
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...preferred term among the faithful. These people spend roughly $20 billion a year on items ranging from seed for backyard feeders to high-priced guided tours in pursuit of rare or exotic species. Only two purchases are required, however, to get started: a pair of binoculars and a field guide, i.e., a book illustrating the identifying characteristics of birds encountered in nature. A good field guide is a bird in the hand...
...late Roger Tory Peterson invented this sort of book with his pioneering A Field Guide to the Birds (1934), and more than 8 million copies of Peterson's guide and its diverse updatings and amplifications have been sold. Numerous competing volumes have crowded into this commercial niche. Now the birding world is aflutter over the near simultaneous arrival of two more, highly publicized guides: Kenn Kaufman's Birds of North America (Houghton Mifflin; 384 pages; $20) and David Allen Sibley's The Sibley Guide to Birds (Knopf; 544 pages...
...knowledgeable birders. Both Kaufman, 46, and Sibley, 39, dropped out of school (Kaufman before the 11th grade, Sibley after a year in college) to study their feathered friends full time, and both quickly achieved legendary status among the reigning experts for their encyclopedic knowledge and their uncanny skill at field identification. But despite their similar backgrounds and levels of expertise, Kaufman and Sibley evidently have very different notions of what a useful field guide should...
Kaufman aims his book at beginning birders, those who may have trouble telling a hawk from a handsaw. While other helpful guides are targeted toward neophytes, Kaufman's comes with a technological breakthrough. Birders have long disagreed over whether field guides should be illustrated with paintings or photographs. Both have inherent disadvantages: artwork invariably distorts, however minutely, the reality it attempts to convey, whereas snapshots may capture an actual bird in an uncharacteristic pose or in unusual light or shadow. In either case the image on the page will differ, perhaps significantly, from the bird in the bush...
Kaufman attempts to resolve this dilemma by presenting photographs that he has digitally edited on a computer, using his vast experience in the field to render each bird image as accurately and typically as possible. The results are regularly clear, colorful and impressive. Those who want a single, near Platonic representation of a particular species should turn to Kaufman first...