Is your copy of Peter Pyle's Identification Guide to North American Birds: Part 1 looking a little rough around the edges? Have years of hard work in the field, unexpected rain showers, coffee drips and the ever-frequent smear of bird poop, left the paper wavy and stained? Good news, Peter and IBP are announcing that a new edition is in the works! A lot has changed since the last edition came out in 1997 so an update is no small task. A publication date is not in focus yet, but at this point a best guess would be in early 2021 some time.
Now you may be thinking, what about all my notes in the margins and the details I've added over the years? Those are very important! Peter wants to hear about them and include your input to improve the new edition. Please read this message from Peter:
Hello bird banders, molt enthusiasts, and the like,
Gratuitous Blue Grosbeak. Photo by Dan Pancamo/Flickr.)
I hope you are all doing as well as possible these days and can carry on this spring or soon with socially distanced bird banding and other fieldwork activities.
At long last, I will be devoting the rest of 2020 to revising Part 1 of the Identification Guide to North American Birds. Prominent changes will include a revision to the Howell et al. (2003) molt terminology including, e.g., "preformative" in lieu of the former "first prebasic" molts, and I will be incorporating the new "WRP" codes (but don't worry, these will not be fully replacing the familiar BBL codes!). I will also be revising the introduction and each account by incorporating whatever relevant literature has been published since 1997, as well as a few prior missed publications that I have become aware of. I'll be adding an account for Eurasian Collared-Dove, at least, maybe a few other additional species. In addition, I will look into providing an App for it, once we have the published version completed.
I know a lot of you have field-worked copies full of notes in the margins correcting errors or suggesting things that could use improvement. I'm supposing now would be a great time to go through these and email me anything that you would like to see incorporated. Anything at all! From the tiniest typo, to full notes suggesting an account overhaul, to improved biometric data, to copies of obscure or regional papers or documents that you know of that cover age, sex, molt or geographic variation in the landbirds treated in the guide. Any and all help will be acknowledged of course.
You can send information and updates in the body of an email, a doc file, a text file, or just about any format you prefer. My email address is ppyle@birdpop.org. To help me locate and organize submitted information, please include the four-letter code for each species you send information about somewhere in the body of the email or in the text of the file. It can either be the code listed in the guide or a revised code if it has changed since 1997 9for example, either YWAR or YEWA would be fine for Yellow Warbler). Please use EUCD if you are submitting information about Eurasian Collared-Dove.
Thank you and best in health and banding to all,
Peter Pyle (ppyle@birdpop.org)
