Geographical Variation in the Availability of Natural History Field Guides? Personal Reflections, Causes, and Consequences.

According to the old, familiar story in Genesis, the very first thing Adam did in the Garden of Eden was to give “names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Gen. 2:20, King James Version). In like manner, one of the first steps we all take toward understanding the natural world as an ecologist or evolutionary biologist is to make discriminations among different organisms and tag them with names. Each observation is a question—“That brownish active bird I glimpsed that just snatched an insect in my garden—is it an eastern phoebe, an eastern wood-pewee, or maybe even an exceedingly rare vagrant, the Asian brown flycatcher?”Unlike Adam, we rarely name organisms entirely by ourselves in answering such questions but instead rely on the accumulated wisdom and discernment of past generations of naturalists and biologists. A field guide is a distillation of that body of knowledge into a compact, easily carried book (which these days may be electronic) that aims to help readers, both professional and amateur, to identify organisms (e.g., birds, wildflowers, damselflies) or other natural objects (e.g., minerals), as it were, on the fly while the observer is out in nature; moreover, field guides often go beyond mere naming to sketch key natural history details of a species’ “story” (Holt 2009), delineating the environment in which it lives and where it fits in the history of life. In this short essay I will suggest that there have been historically strong geographical differences in the availability of popular and affordable field guides, which may have had an influence on the level of ecological and evolutionary research in particular regions, including, in particular (I conjecture), comparisons between temperate and tropical biomes. I will make this suggestion based on some personal experiences in my own life. I recognize that this impressionistic approach to the issue of geographical variation in field