I have loved field guides since I was a kid. Loved their glossy pages, loved the photos of glittering gemstones, many-eyed insects, glassy-backed dolphins. I fawned over them in bookstores and inhaled their unique scent, more acrid than the earthy smell of my many paperbacks. I compared the rocks I found in my backyard to the ones in the photos, and I marveled that the natural world could be categorized and imaged this way.
Had every type of rock birthed on this planet been photographed and named? Did I now hold all that knowledge in my hand? How was that even possible? How magical were the creators of such books?
I carried this field guide obsession into adulthood. Today, I own a shelf overflowing with field guides—ones for birds, rocks, insects, mammals, plants from different regions, denizens of tidepools. I adore them. I devour them like comic books, which is kind of what they are: tales of heroic survival and origin stories that defy belief, illustrated in color.
A visitor in a Glacier National Park visitor center once showed me a photo they had taken of a red fox peeking around their vehicle’s tire on the eastern edge of the park. I assured them that there were indeed red foxes over that way, that they had been released as part of a plan to repopulate the area with native species.
A colleague of mine behind the visitor center front desk, an elderly volunteer who had lived in Montana and worked at the park for years, stopped me. “No,” she said, “there aren’t any red foxes there.”
I frowned—knowing she was usually correct—and pulled out our field guide. “But that’s what it says in here,” I told her.
I showed her the page, complete with photos of released foxes, and she acknowledged that I must be right. “But how did you know that? You’ve only been here a few months,” she said.
“Because…I read the field guide?”
“The entire thing?”
“…Yes?”
I learned over the years that even among nature nerds it is not normal to devour field guides and natural histories like they are celebrity gossip magazines. But in effect that’s what they are for me.
Those mountains, the ones everyone photographs? They’re famous. And this book will give me the skinny on how they were formed, how they were named, what plants and animals pepper their peaks. For a nature nerd, a national park nerd, how could I not get excited about such a book?
What I also learned is that it’s not that I am unique among park naturalists in wanting to learn about nature: I am unique in that I love to read. I love to read. I can not emphasize the word enough to give you an adequate sense of just how much I have always loved to read, how thrilling I find books of any type.
Combining two of my passions—books and nature!—means double the excitement. And so, as I traveled the America’s national parks working as a park ranger, I collected field guides, natural histories, medicinal tomes for local flora. Other rangers would tell me that I didn’t need to purchase the book, that it was in our park library, that I could get by without reading it at all, really.
I would nod and agree—“Yeah, yeah, who needs books?”—and then I would buy the book anyway and sit with it in my room that night, touching the pages and smiling, just as I used to back when I was a kid with a flashlight under my pillow, shocked to find that I could hold the entire world’s wilderness in the palm of my small hand.
To start your own field guide journey, here are Goodreads list of favorite field guides.