What I aim to do

I love to be outdoors and to know what I am seeing and hearing out there.  Naturally, I often use field guides to help me with this identification process.  Over the years I have had the chance to work with some great field guides and some that really aren't all that helpful.  I have also had the chance to take classes at the University of Michigan about both trees and birds.  In my Woody Plants class, I had the chance to see how the information presented in "field guides" can differ from how people actually identify species in the field, and even how they are taught in a class by the very writer of that field guide.

Field guides for birds have come a long way from the first one put out by Roger Tory Peterson.  His innovation was to identify and explain field marks for identifying birds, that is, the marks that one can identify when viewing the bird in its natural habitat.  This was a marked contrast from earlier guides which relied on the "birder" to have killed the bird and have it in hand.  Peterson's guide were a great leap forward, and bird guides have continued to build on his innovation, including better illustrations, including more different ages and variations in plumage, and including more information gleaned from the collective experience with this form of birding.

Most other areas do not have the same great field guides that birds do.  Most tree guides still seem stuck in with an overly technical style that makes them difficult to use for the average person and much less fun for the experienced to use.

In addition, most field guides are limited to only certain groups of species.  This makes sense in some ways, because a field guide has to be small in order to be useful.  No one wants to lug a 30 pound tome into the field.  But this separation means that if you have a field guide to birds and you happen to see a mammal, you will have no guide to help you with identification at all.

In 2009, I had the chance to visit Yosemite National Park.  While I was there, I wanted to identify the trees.  I didn't have a field guide that covered western trees, so I went to the nature shop to see if I could find one that would allow me to identify the trees.  I found some tree specific guides that were less than inspiring.  They had black and white line drawings, and descriptions that seemed to focus more on explaining everything about the tree but didn't really help me tell one from another easily.  Then, my partner Kellie noticed a field guide that would amaze us both.  It was the John Muir Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.

This guide is, quite simply, the best field guide I have ever seen.  It is a guide to just about anything alive you can see in the Sierra Nevada and some things that are not alive.  The illustrations and descriptions are clear, and the field marks are prominently displayed.  The descriptions of the field marks are often done in a non-technical, easy to remember way.  The book was constantly in my pocket as we backpacked through the wilderness of Yosemite, and using the guide we successfully identified almost everything that we came across and were interested enough to ID.  We identified birds, trees, shrubs, herbs, lichens, spiders, snakes, mammals, mushrooms, amphibians and insects.  The one disappointment was that it did not include mosses.  Kellie and I are both experienced and relatively adept at identifying birds and plants, but this guide allowed us to identify things that we had very little experience with distinguishing like mushrooms and lichens.  I was supremely impressed with the book, and wished that there would be more great field guides like this.

One feature of the Laws guide is that it is very geographically focused.  It only covers the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.  This might seem like a severe limitation, in that the guide is far less useful anywhere else you might be.  However, this limitation turned out to be a tremendous strength.  By limiting the geographic scope of the book, it allows it to cover many different types of species, but still be small enough to be easily carried in the field.  Furthermore, actually using the guide is so much easier, because when you are looking for a species in the book, you do not need to flip past pages and pages of species that are ruled out simply by range alone.

My dream is to create such a guide for the north woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin where I live.  While I don't have all the knowledge and skills to create this guide right now, I have the ultimate goal of creating it.

I also intend to take advantage of new and modern technologies to create a better guide.  This blog will be what I do while I am in the long and involved process of creating this guide.  I will blog about the species and the information that will be in the guide.  However, blogs are an interactive media.  I intend to use the power of crowdsourcing to gather the collective wisdom of the outdoors community to help create the best possible guide.  The experience and knowledge of far more people can be aggregated and help to create a fundamentally better guide.  I also hope to be able to take advantage of the massive portable data possibilites of devices like the iPhone and iPod touch to create a guide that includes pictures, audio, video to bring field guides into the next millenium.

I am extremely excited about this project and invite you to follow and participate in this journey!