The Birding Series - Part 3

​A humorous part of birding is how the creatures are actually identified.  The common birds are easy – bluebirds, robins, cardinals, crow, red wing black birds and so on.  It’s the birds you don’t see often based on where you live that are difficult to identify.
All of the birders carry a field guide.  The field guide will show a full color picture of both the female and male of the species, give information on type of nest, food, flight pattern, migration, type of egg, incubation, fledging, type of song or call and where they live in your state.  I have four bird guide books.  Two are specifically for birds in Wisconsin, one is for birds of North America and one is a songbird guide with recordings of the song for each bird.
Of course, you can’t haul four books around with you while tramping through the woods.  For field trips I choose the smallest, about 3” x 3” because it fits in my back pocket.  When out with a group I soon discovered that each of us had a different guide.  You would think there would be some standardization but that’s not the case.  Birders tend to be very individualistic.
The identification process was less than scientific.  Our guide would point in a direction and say – there is a bird, what is it.  We would use our new binocular skills and spot the creature in a tree about 40’ tall and 30 yards away.  Then the guessing begins.  Someone would call out a bird species wanting to be the first to call it right.  Our guide remained silent, which meant the first guess was wrong.  Then one or two other people would call out a guess, both wrong.  Then we would lower our binoculars and get out our field guides.  We stood in a circle examining our books trying to find the right bird.  Someone would find a bird in their field guide and show it to the rest of us.  Then each of us would locate that bird in our own field guide.
We would then compare our field guides and decide by consensus the bird we had just seen.  I laughed out loud and announced we were birding by consensus and everyone in the group agreed.
Selecting popular books is much the same process.  At the Writer’s Institute I attended in April the buzz was about fantasy thrillers like Game of Thrones and Hunger Games.  Everyone droned on and on about these remarkable books.  One of the features most admired was the creativity of creating fantasy worlds.  The consensus was that it was a remarkable accomplishment.  Next year the buzz will be something else.
My view is that it is much more of a challenge to create a fiction world that readers are familiar with.  I find Kent Haruf’s  Holt, Colorado and Richard Russo’s Empire Falls much more creative than any fantasy world.    The fantasy world is built only on imagination and everything can work exactly as the author wants.  Holt and Empire Falls are based in a reader’s experience so the world and characters that inhabit the town must ring true. 
No surprise, I don’t agree with the consensus.  No worry, next year’s book buzz will change – maybe it will be thrillers.