The Golden Guide

Looking up the Cave Swallow account in my Golden Guide brought back memories. The Golden Guide was my first field guide. At the time there weren’t many choices, and even fewer for me. I wasn’t in any birding loop; I didn’t even know there were other people who were interested in birds. I was lucky to even learn about the Golden Guide.

My earliest memories are of trying to catch birds. I could get just close enough to see they weren’t all alike. One morning when I was 6 or 7, living at Forbes Air Force Base in Pauline, Kansas, a bird I'd never seen flew over base housing. I’d grown up with big cargo planes and choppers flying over every day, but somehow this bird seemed really large. My brother Chris said it was a Great Blue Heron. I don’t know if I was more impressed by the bird or by the fact that Chris could identify it.

Between brothers, the “B” World Book, and a page of bird pictures in our massive home dictionary, I learned the names of some common species. Later, I found a great but unwieldy book of Audubon bird prints in the school library. My favorite childhood memories are of visiting the center of the universe, Kaplan, Louisiana. I could read my Uncle Julius’s copy of Lowery’s Louisiana Birds--still the best bird book ever in my mind--and walk the fields with my cousins to find birds to identify.

In 1973, when I was 9, we moved off base into a country neighborhood where all the kids were BB-gun naturalists. When anyone would shoot an unknown bird, we’d all go over to look at it. I was the kid that knew the birds. However, one day in 1976 on the bus to school one of my friends announced that he had something that was going to make him the group’s bird expert. In his hands was a small book. He wouldn’t let me look in it, but judging from the names he was pulling out of it, I knew I wanted to. In his hands the book was a dangerous tool of misidentification. I pointed that out but no one would listen because I didn’t have the book.

In 1977 my family went on vacation to Estes Park, Colorado. It was a great trip, lots of new birds. One day we went into a park gift shop and my parents asked if there was anything we wanted. My folks were pretty careful with money, so that was a rare offer. We looked around, but most of the stuff wasn’t worth spending money on. Then I saw the bookshelf, and on the bookshelf, the same small book my friend had, A Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America. The Golden Guide. The price was $4.95, which was a lot, but I knew I’d get that much use out of it so I worked up the courage to ask. My parents were pleased that I was asking for a book, and agreed to part with their five-dollar bill.

The Golden Guide was great, full of birds I'd never dreamed of. The illustrations were like logos, clean and well-defined, and vivid in their colors. However, they had a subtlety that captured the essence of the species--rare in bird art. I read it constantly, with one notable interruption: In early '79 I came home from school one day and couldn't find it. I asked my mom if she'd seen it, and she told me she'd packed in preparation for our upcoming move to Louisiana. I wouldn't see it again until she bought our new house and we unpacked in August. It was a rough stretch without it.

That Golden Guide was heavy duty. I wore it as a hat in hailstorms and started a campfire with the copyright page. It stayed remarkably new-looking for years anyway, but eventually wear caught up to it. Newer field guides caught up to it, too, and passed it up in many ways. It still has some fine features, and I love the artwork. The ID aspects in my old copy seem basic now, but that’s not such a bad thing. I’m often equally amazed at the higher end skills and lack of fundamentals of some young birders. A thorough reading of an older Golden Guide or Peterson guide might not be such a bad idea for up-and-coming birders.