My 1966 Field Guide

I’m reasonably sure that I did not start really paying attention to birds until 1968, when I would have turned ten years old, or later. Back then, of course, we couldn’t even dream of digital photography, or a magical phone that would fit in one’s pocket and could carry a digital bird guide in an app. So the two indispensable elements for any birder were a good pair of binoculars and a book with pictures of each species, a map of their distribution, and a brief description. Mine was the 1966 “Golden Field Guide” to Birds of North America.

I am not, by nature, a hoarder. And yet, somehow, I still own this book. Only about half of its paperback binding still does its job, and it definitely looks the worse for wear. But I still have it with me. It occurred to me, as I thought about writing this post, that I may still own it precisely because I stopped birding during my middle years; I was just interested enough to want to keep a field guide with me each time I moved, but not interested enough to buy a new one. (For the record, I also still own the first Spanish-language guide to Mexico’s birds that I bought after moving to Mexico in 1983.)

The Golden Field Guide cost me the princely sum of $3.95 USD. Shockingly, that means it was slightly more expensive in current dollars than my latest 2017 National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, which cost me $22.95 a few years ago.

For the most part, the two books have a similar format, with range maps and a brief description on the left, and painted illustrations on the right. But the older book is much smaller, so its descriptions are much shorter, and it omits rare border-area birds entirely. I imagine this is because bird guides in those days were true field guides, meant to be carried into the field while birding. Nowadays, we just use our mobile phones. And the Golden Field Guide includes visual sonograms for most birds’ songs, which is no longer very helpful in our age of xeno-canto and phone apps with multiple recordings for each species.

Of course, no one is thinking of buying a 1966 guide today. Instead, the value in looking at such an old book is what it reveals about changes in our natural world and bird science. The taxonomy presented there is wildly different from today’s taxonomy. Back then, falcons were closely related to hawks and vultures, but owls were not. Flamingos were related to herons. The Yellow-breasted Chat and Olive Warbler had not yet been expelled from the wood warblers.

When you get into taxonomic names, things get really wild. The Golden Field Guide lists 9 members of the Vermivora genus of Wood Warblers; today, only two are named as such. In that book’s defense, a third member, Bachman’s Warbler, may have gone extinct since then. In fact, very few of the taxonomic names for Wood Warblers in the 1966 edition still work today.

This observation touches a nerve for me, because while birding with my Mexican friends we must decide whether to use Mexican common names, taxonomic names in Latin, or the ABA-approved English common names. Almost nobody uses common names in Spanish, as they have never been standardized and change from town to town, or state to state. Some of my biologist friends prefer to use taxonomic names, a choice which I respect. But my 1966 field guide reveals that English names are enormously more stable than the Latin names. A relatively few English names (Pigeon Hawk? Sparrow Hawk? Boat-tailed Grackle?) have changed in the last 60 years.

Still, even English names have been greatly complicated by the many splits and lumps that have occurred in the same period. We still talk about Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers, but they have long been joined into the Yellow-rumped Warbler species. White-winged, Slate-colored, Oregon, and Gray-headed Juncos are all now Dark-eyed Juncos, while the Mexican Junco’s name was changed to Yellow-eyed Junco, perhaps to align with the new name for the more northerly species.

Perhaps the greatest changes can be found in the section dedicated to birds of prey. The DDT-laced 1960s were terrible times for these charismatic birds. The Bald Eagle population in the American “lower 48” states dropped to only some 500 breeding pairs. Today it breeds anew across most of Canada, all the way to the Atlantic, and in much of the United States, with a total population of around one hundred times what could be found back in the 1960s. Peregrine Falcons, which then bred only in the Arctic, now breed over much of North America, even in Mexico. Similar recoveries can be seen for American Kestrels (then called “Sparrow Hawks”), Prairie Falcons, and Ospreys. And extraordinary conservation efforts have allowed even the critically endangered California Condor, then with a population of only some 50 birds, to increase its population nine-fold and return to three American and one Mexican states.

It was interesting to see the 1966 range map for the Old World Western Cattle Egret, then just starting its march across America’s southeastern states. It only shows the species established in Florida, although it was actually well on its way to conquering the entire continental U.S. and Mexico. There was no entry for the now-ubiquitous Eurasian Collared Dove, as those did not arrive until 1974. But other species have increased their ranges in more natural ways. Every species shown on the following page, with the exception of the American Flamingo, has since expanded northward. (The “Wood Ibis” shown here is now more correctly known as the Wood Stork.)

In fact, spending time with my 1966 field guide turned out to be a surprisingly encouraging experience. While we all know that overall bird populations have dropped by 30% since then, many individual species are holding on quite well. To quote the title of one of my favorite books, Earth Abides.