With the new Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America due out August 28th, it may be time to replace your old guide. If you have a vintage first edition Peterson, or your Sibley looks the opposite as our tattered copy, you may not need a new guide, but hey, there’s always room for one more.
- You may need a new field guide… if your field guide can be in both the front and back seat of your car at the same time
- You may need a new field guide… if your field guide has Oldsquaws, Pitiayumi Warblers, and Olive-backed Thrushes
- You may need a new field guide… if your field guide has been swimming more times than you have
- You may need a new field guide… if your field guide has seen so much sun that the Painted Bunting plate has faded into one color
- You may need a new field guide… if your field guide’s pages are full of dog ears and elephant wrinkles
- You may need a new field guide… if you loaned out your field guide, but do not remember to whom
- You may need a new field guide… if your new puppy discovered your field guide
- You may need a new field guide… if when the wind blows you have to chase after parts of your field guide
- You may need a new field guide… if your field guide once had nearly 400 pages and now has only 300
- You may need a new field guide… if you just plain want a new cool field guide and read our review of the new Peterson Guide to Birds of North America
Haha! Great one! What if mine is written on stone tablets? Should I get a new one? It doesn’t get dog-eared…
Patrick – Hilarious!! It may not get dog-eared but oh the pain if it gets dropped on your foot.
*LOL* It seems I don’t need a new field guide right now. I’ll definitely keep this in mind for the future, however.
I’ve often thought that the best medium for a field guide would be the Magic Slate: taxonomic changes, painting errors, distribution changes–all taken care of, presto, just by peeling back the top layer!
r
PS: I hope I’m not the only one out there who remembers Magic Slates!
jajajaja great post, fortunately my field guides havent gone swimming yet, just my camera, binocular, cell phone, scope you name it….but not the field guides.
I do have a first edition Peterson that my mother bought for me secondhand at $2.75 when I was about nine years old. A bit tattered, indeed. It stayed in pretty good shape despite being dropped in the mud and rained upon.
I just put up a few pictures of it on this blog entry (I don’t do HTML):
blog(dot)rosyfinch(dot)com/?p=187