Natural gifts for putting a name on everything in nature

So that slightly-smallerthan-full-sized, refurbished replica of the Large Hadron Collider—who knew that Ocean State Job Lot offered such things, and with a Crazy Deal gift card for $2.5 billion to boot!—is humming along under the menorah and tree and occasionally rattling the foundation as the so-called Smaller Hadron Collider sends beams of sub-atomic particles crashing into each other. An early holiday present—a basic edition of the James Webb telescope that appeared in the list of the OSJL Insider Coupons (and how could I say no to that?)—Is, just as advertised, affixed to my chimney to provide decent, if not stellar, views of enough of the cosmos, or, at least, the sky over North Stonington, to satisfy my curiosity. I have my binoculars—also from Job Lot (are you seeing a pattern here?)—and, from other stores, spotting scopes, microscopes, hand-held magnifying loupes, and many of the other tools of the trade I mentioned in the first segment of the Naturalist’s Annual Gift Guide for the Perplexed, Now, with the optical gear in place, I’m assuming that you have something in your field of view and you’re ready to confront the First Question that every naturalist begins his or her journey by asking. This is, of course: What Is It?

Many devotees of the natural world can tell you exactly which animal, plant, rock, or star triggered the push to put a name on an item, but I, alas, don’t remember my particular trigger. My best guess, however, is that it was probably lots of things at once, which is still typical of my wide-ranging curiosity about the entirety of nature. In response to what was most likely a deluge, my beleaguered parents, who were more comfortable in downtown Providence than in any local wildlife refuge, responded in a way that I do remember with precision. They bought me a small library of field guides for kids.

I couldn’t have been more than five or six, but I had better than decent reading skills, so I started to devour the books, which were part of the Golden Guides, a series of pocket-sized volumes devoted to various parts of the natural world, from insects to the heavens. This series, incidentally, is still in print, almost three-quarters of a century since the first one— on birds, not surprisingly— debuted in 1949.

Research psychologists delving into the mysteries of addiction and the obsessivecompulsive disorder are forever looking for “gateway” drugs and other nonpharmaceutical triggers that put the afflicted on this path. No doubt I was genetically predisposed to meeting the criteria for eventual diagnosis, but I’m pretty sure the “substance” that sent me over the edge was any one of the Golden Guides. That said, if you have a budding young naturalist on your list, and you’re looking for a perfect gift, visit a bookstore.

The Golden franchise is now no longer the only series of field guides for kids, so you can find perfect volumes on a variety of topics by the likes of National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife,

and Peterson. I have some of each, and I don’t think you could go wrong with any of them. Indeed, the publishing houses that have crafted these intriguing books offer “adult” versions, as in, more detailed and advanced tomes for older obsessives rather than books devoted to prurient aspects of nature, of the field guide franchise, and within a vast collection of titles, you’re sure to find something that would please your naturalist no end.

The granddaddy of the group is the Peterson Guide to the whatevers that was started by legendary ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson in 1934 as A Field Guide to the Birds: Giving Field Marks of All Species Found in Eastern North America. If you can find a first edition in mint condition, it could set you back $15,000—a small price to pay for your naturalist’s tears of joy—or you can purchase a facsimile edition for a bit less. I don’t have all of the Petersons in my library, but there’s never a volume on an intriguing group that I haven’t either bought new or run across at a used book sale and added to my shelves. A more recent trend is to offer more advanced versions of basic editions, as in, the Peterson Field Guide to Warblers, which is an offshoot to the original bird guide. I bought that one, too, and you’ll be hard-pressed to run out of gift possibilities... for yourself, or your favorite other naturalist.

The Peterson collection, vast though it is, has lots of competitors. In addition to all the other publishers I mentioned who are working the kids circuit, be sure to peruse, at the very least, natural history titles by David

Sibley, Kenn Kaufmann, Richard Crossley, and the up and coming Princeton University Press, which has started to lead the pack in developing new field guides after Houghton Mifflin Harcourt left the fray several years ago and sold its bookpublishing business, which included the Peterson guides, to HarperCollins and an uncertain future.

Princeton, thank God, seems to have picked up the slack, and I’ve spent countless hours—I hope not to my readership’s chagrin— learning to identify such obscure creatures as flower flies and the entire realm of local insects through Princeton-developed guides. Anything with this university’s imprint I can recommend without hesitation as a fine present for a naturalist, and I’ll even be featuring author interviews and field tests of new Press guides in reviews I’m planning for upcoming editions of the Journal.

I’d also be remiss in this guidance if I failed to mention the fact that there are digital versions of most of these physical books that you can put on your tablet or smart phone for toting into the field without the need to hire a porter. I love actual books, but hosts of physical challenges, from an iffy back to bad knees, have compromised my ability, assuming my memory is still correct, to haul half a ton of field guides on investigatory treks, so digital tomes are fast gaining attractiveness.

There are also apps you can use on your devices to supposedly eliminate the need for field guides altogether, but gift such AI-powered wizardry as Merlin, PlantNet, iNaturalist, Seek, Lens, and myriad other organismidentification software with caution. For starters, and this is really quite remarkable, many of the best apps are free—for some, you’ll have to deal with ads—so that alone might dilute their gift impact. Then there’s the matter of accuracy: it’s certainly better overall than it used to be, and it gets better with every app iteration. But when the topic comes up on guided walks and in classes and public presentations, my mantra is always this: check your results against established sources. Your mileage may vary.

Last but hardly least, remember that the First Question actually has two parts... two inextricable parts: the answer and the journey to your taxonomic destination. The critical problem with apps is that you only learn a name. You don’t get any hands-on insight into the classification process that led scientists to put the critter into its particular place on the Tree of Life.

Learning this process— as in, for example, understanding why a flock of Horned larks observed along the tundra-like edges of the Misquamicut State Beach parking lot did not harbor any members of a hoped-for distant relative, the Lapland Longspur—can be hard work, but doing it is both important and necessary if you want to actually learn how the natural world is put together. So use the software, by all means, but then study the hardware, a.k.a, field guides and other books. The former offers the tip of the taxonomic iceberg; the latter helps you get the rest of the picture. For a complete view, give both.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Fellman You don’t need a field guide to tell you that much of natural life has disappeared from the fields, forests, and coastlines as winter weather begins to settle in.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Fellman ABOVE: As has become typical, the grassy area around the Misquamicut State Beach parking lot often hosts a collection of birds that normally are at home in the tundra during spring and summer. Often, such autumn and winter commoners as Horned larks are joined by a quite rare bird called the Lapland Longspur, but a deep dive into the Naturalist’s field guides didn’t reveal a hoped-for Longspur among the larks. TOP RIGHT: Whatever you happen to see in nature, there’s almost certainly a field guide—or an app—that will help you determine its identity. RIGHT: A field guide to the nomenclature of full moons in the northeast would tell you that this is the Beaver Moon rising over the landscape at the end of November.