IHT Ep 011 Field Guides and Dichotomous Keys

The Wall of Green

When I was in high school, I was part of this program called Project Discover. The basic idea was to connect students with a mentor in a field that interested them. My most passionate interest at the time was the wild and natural world. Regular listeners will know that, at that time I desperately wanted to know how I might live off the land, to feed myself from what I could hunt and fish and gather. There was only one slight obstacle. Nobody around me seemed to know anything about hunting, fishing, animal tracks, or how to make a meal from acorns or weeds. Truth was, I didn’t even really know what the weeds around me were. My mother was a dedicated gardener, and she knew the vegetables and flowers, but much of her knowledge stopped at the garden’s fence. 

Sure, I knew a dandelion from a violet because everyone seemed to know what those were. But or as much as I loved the woods, they were in many ways just a wall of undifferentiated green. like an impenetrable hedge. Birds and butterflies and animal tracks were even more mysterious. A flash of color would wink from the underbrush or a coquettish wing would wave from across the street … and then it was gone. What was that thing? There was no time to study it. What should I have even looked at? How should I have turned my attention? Should I have looked at the bill, the feet? Should I have squinted to see if there was a subtle, yellow ring around the eye? The whole wild world was overrun with mystery … And I had no way through all of the complexity. 

 So when I became a part of Project Discover, I asked the program coordinator if she could find someone who might teach me about something wild. Maybe plants. I was really interested in plants. And unlike birds and mammals, they didn’t run away. Maybe I could learn which ones were edible and be one step closer to my dream of living off the land. 

John Souther

The mentor that she found was a man named John Souther, and he was very old. Old enough that I was surprised that he was allowed to drive. I don’t know for sure, but I think he might have been in his nineties. 

I am not proud to admit that I was disappointed by this. This old man was so slow. I had to speak loudly for him to hear. What was I possibly going to learn about living in the wilderness from a man who had trouble navigating the back steps? 

I could not have been more wrong. 

That first day, John and I  tramped through the long grasses by the edge of the woods and before we looked at a single plant, he announced that the first thing I needed  was to become familiar with the tools of his trade. He showed me his pocket hand less and then he announced “Now for trees, you want Petrides. And for flowers there’s no beating Newcomb’s.” and he pulled from his backpacktwo dog-eared and weather stained books that would change my life. 

It is hard to overstate how profound this single gift was for a young naturalist. It was as if he had handed me the key to a secret door. 

I still have George Petrides’ Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs. Its pages are beaten and crinckled. It is stained from all the leaves that I’ve pressed in its pages. But the rugged paper still does its job. And, even more precious, I still have Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. It comes with me on every vacation I take, and my family affectionately calls it the Duke–both as reference to its privileged place among all my five long shelves of field guides and also as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Duke Nukem, the character from GI Joe.  

Dweebishness

In this age of information tsunami, it’s hard to appreciate what a hard-won jewel a good field guide is. 

Learning to identify our fellow creatures has earned a certain reputation for dweebishness as boring and pointless as stamp collecting. And while there is certainly no accounting for taste, but I would challenge anyone to spend a single weekend learning the trees on their street or the weeds in the yard and not find something that sparks delight.. The truth is that the creatures around us are so wondrous and so surprising that they will inspire even in the hearts of those too jaded or too cool to be impressed.. 

So today, let’s talk about the little books that have served as passports to nature itself. Let’s talk about field guides. I’m Ben Lord. You’re listening to I Heart This.  

The Logic of a Good Key

Names

There are many books out there that are just a collection of pretty pictures of birds or flowers meant to be left on the coffee table. Often, they mix together creatures that live far away with the ones you might actually see out in your backyard. This podcast is not about those books as delightful as they may be. The books that I’m writing about today are tools … like a hatchet or a pocketknife … meant to be carried outside, to be gotten dirty, to be put to work. 

A field guide is a tool designed to help someone learn the name of a thing–and a good one usually has two parts. 

The first is a comprehensive catalog of drawings, paintings, or photographs of all the particular things you are likely to encounter in a given place–all the birds in the eastern United States, all the constellations of the Northern Hemisphere, all the wildflowers of New England. This is the most obvious part of a field guide and the part that most people think of. 

But the other component is just as critical. The other part is a good key.   

The logic of a good key is simple. Instead of looking at all of a flower in its overwhelming detail–petals, sepals, stamens, leaves, their margins, their growth habit, their habitat, their venation, and whether or not they have tiny hairs on their stems–a good key asks you to focus in on just … one … thing. One thing at a time. 

Are the leaves needle-like like on a pine tree or broad like a maple? 

Are the leaves arranged directly opposite from each other on the twig or do they alternate, one side, then the other? 

Keys that work like this are called dichotomous because they are just a long list of paired options–dichotomies. 

One question at a time. Each question leading to another and another. Each one focusing your mind on just one important observation. Until, after a few minutes of careful study, you have made a new friend. You’ve exchanged pleasantries. And now you know this new being’s name. 

Names Aren’t Everything

A name, at its most basic, is a line of demarcation. It says this thing, a daisy fleabane or a scarlet tanager, is something separate and unique. There may be similar creatures, but THIS is a thing of its own, worthy of attention. 

Names aren’t everything, of course. They’re really just placeholders. They don’t tell you the history, the spirit, the utility, the beauty, or the mystery of a thing. 

I once met someone who didn’t want to learn the names of the constellations. She was afraid that putting the stars in little mental boxes would diminish the awe she felt on a clear, dark winter’s night. I appreciate her sentiment. And there is something to it. It is possible  to become complacent when we know the name of something. It creates the illusion that we somehow know it. We stop looking at something as the ineffible unknowable mystery that it is. 

But I disagree with the claim that names somehow rob the world of its majesty. Knowing the name of something, give it a home in your own mind, a little crevice in which stories can collect and germinate and grow. Because I can identify Polaris, the north star, and I have a name to attach to it, I don’t just see it as a point of light. I see all the things I’ve come to know about it too. I see the globe of our own Earth, endlessly spinning on its tilted axis. I see navigators at sea finding their way home by pointing their sextant at that star. I see long exposure photographs of the night sky where Polaris stands still at the center as every other star dances in a ring around it. And I think of how over the next 2,000 Polaris will pass on its mantle as the North Star to Gamma Cephei as the Earth’s axis wobbles like a sluggish top. All of that history and mystery … because I know its name. 

Names don’t have to diminish our sense of wonder. More often than not, they magnify it. 

There’s an App for That

Nowadays, there are a whole bunch of new tools that make naming things very easy. When new acquaintances learn that I am interested in birds or flowers, many of them ask whether I have seen some app or another on my phone. Merlin, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology will listen, through your phone, to the birdsongs around you, and tell you the names of the singers. Another app takes your grainy picture of a leaf, and tells you which species it is. These tools are, without a doubt, amazing. They work like magic, and, surprisingly, they work pretty well. 

But they miss something crucial. 

Training Your Mind

Using a key in an IRL field guide doesn’t just give you the name of a thing. It teaches you how to see. Slowly, over months and years, the questions of the key become imprinted on your own mind … until the key itself lives inside of you. I remember being out with friends one day and coming across a flower that I didn’t recognize, and being the extrovert that I am, I bent down to make its acquaintance. My friend asked what it was, and I said I didn’t know, but I would look it up when I got home. And as is our reaction with so many things in life these days, she pulled out her phone and she asked, “Would you like me to send you a picture of it so that you can identify it later?” But I stood up and thanked her and told her I didn’t need it, that I would remember it. “You’ll remember?” she asked with an incredulous expression on her face as if she was wondering how I could possibly remember all of the details I’d need in order to figure out which of the hundreds of flowers in the book matched the one I happened to stumble on that day. 

If you haven’t practiced using a good key, “downloading” a flower or a tree might seem just as magical as those AI identification apps on your phone. But there is nothing magical about it. Anyone can learn if they spend time with a good key. The first few questions become second nature to ask. How many petals? Toothed leaf edges or smooth? Alternate or opposite branching? Simple or compound? Those questions alone are usually enough to narrow your search to a few dozen species. Practice with the key give you the ability to draw a quick and accurate sketch in your mind’s eye. And no app can do that for you. 

History of Good Guides–Democracy

The story of how and why the first field guides came to be is worth telling. Partly for how it reveals that their existence was far from inevitable. Indeed, the story of how we got them is convoluted and full of missteps.  

We human beings have been learning about and identifying our fellow creatures since long before we were human. There were obvious utilitarian reasons for this and probably aesthetic and spiritual ones too. For most of that long history, writing didn’t exist. And even after its inventions, written records were rare and only accessible to a literate few. And all of this is important to the story of field guides because a field guide is at its most essential, a book. 

Through the 1300s in Europe, books were painstaking to make. Paper was impractically expensive to produce, so most books were made from pages of animal skin. Each one took long hours of liming, dehairing, stretching, and scraping. Any words or pictures were painted on by hand. Add to that the work of revision, decoration, and binding and it’s easy to see why books were rare and precious … and often seen as an unnecessary luxury. In medieval Europe, writing’s primary purpose was religious. Writing on worldly matters was, at best, suspect and, at worst, heretical. Secular texts were often sanded away so that the precious parchment could be used for the higher purposes of making copies of religious material. The only secular works that survived were ones with obvious practical value–lists of things that could be extracted from the natural world. 

And so … even after thousands of years of writing, and even in the most literate societies, most people who cared to learn about wild creatures did so by asking someone who knew. How much knowledge must have been lost and rediscovered and lost again! How many discoveries must have been made only to be twisted and exaggerated in a generational game of telephone! How precious and fragile the knowledge of the elders must have seemed! 

Today we assume that knowledge and information constantly expands. But among medieval Europeans, knowledge was widely considered to be static. Divinely inspired prophets had written the Bible, and somewhat less divinely inspired pagan Greeks had written their philosophies. And that was it. Anything that there was to know was certainly recorded in those two canons. Knowledge wasn’t discovered. It was handed down … because everything worth knowing had already been recorded. And while this attitude wasn’t universal, it was widespread. And it was certainly expedient for the Church. To many educated medieval Europeans, something was true because it was old and unquestioned … because it was in the Bible or because a church-approved Greek philosophers had testified that it was so. Direct observation was liable to corruption. Real truth came from authority (whether philosophical or theological) and authority came from God. 

But in the 15th century, this began to change. New pulping methods made paper much cheaper, and the European reinvention of movable type meant that, in the course of a few generations, books went from being chained to the walls of fortified abbeys to  … being accessible to … well … a slightly wider, slightly more inclusive elite. But, however slight the change in access, the effects on peoples’ thinking was profound. 

After Bibles one of the earliest demands for books was for knowledge of medicinal plants. Presses all over Europe began putting out herbals. These books were hardly original. They plagiarized each other with impunity and even the books that got plagiarized were mostly error-riddled and poorly translated rehashing of the ancient Greeks. To a modern botanist it would be eminently clear that the people who put out these books had never even seen some of the plants they were talking about. The woodcut pictures in these books, too, were copies of copies of copies even of plants that might have been growing down the block. Nevertheless, many of these books were absolutely beautiful. And, at least on the medieval scale, very popular. 

But putting all these books in the hands of all these people caused changes of its own. Now that many people could read their own Bibles and their own books, more and more of them came face-to-face with the inconsistencies between the pronouncements of Authority and their own experiences. And this led to a contagious and disruptive skepticism. Theologically, this led to the Protestant reformation. Philosophically, it led to the radical notion that truth might come as much from observation and experience as it did from the ancients. Today birdwatchers have a saying, often attributed to John James Audobon, the great illustrator of some early field guides, “When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird.” But in Renaissance Europe this was an explosive new idea. 

By the mid-1500s, people were calling out all kinds of errors in the old texts … and they were going out and making observations of their own … writing descriptions of plants and making drawings of what they actually saw … instead of what Dioscorides had seen 1500 years ago. 

These still weren’t field guides. Most of them covered 100 plants or so. And most listed plants alphabetically, which is NOT HELPFUL for identifying anything, but they were an enormous advance over anything that had been available for a thousand years. 

And then something even more explosive happened. Europe discovered the rest of the world. Explorers returned from distant lands with stories, and often specimens, of strange creatures the likes of which Europeans had never seen. Suddenly the list of living creatures known went from the few hundreds of common weeds and wings that could be found in a European countryside to thousands upon thousands of bizarre and mystifying creatures. The living world was dizzying in its diversity. The world, it turned out, had not been fully described by the Greeks at all. They’d barely even seen it. The world wasn’t just big. It was baroque. It was staggeringly complicated. What could possibly be done to make sense of it all? 

In the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists made many attempts to do just that–to organize, to classify, to make sense, to see if there was some underlying order to the flamboyant weirdness of life on this planet. This ultimately resulted in the classification system of Linnaeus, which most people might remember from high school lessons about King Phillip Coming Over For Great Spaghetti–the mnemonic used to remember the nested levels of classification–Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. And still, even then, there was nothing like a modern field guide. 

Why not? The technology, the material, the demand were certainly all there. But the first real illustrated keys wouldn’t appear for centuries after printing technology and colonialism and a widespread and lucrative market for books about living things were all well established. 

In 2011, Lawrence Griffing published a paper in the American Journal of Botany that might offer a clue. In that paper he writes about a striking set of watercolor paintings of plants from the 1600s found in the archives of the Royal Society in London–one of the oldest scientific organizations in the world. And with these illustrations was a key. A true dichotomous key. Perhaps the world’s first true field guide. 

The author of this first true field guide was a man named Richard Waller, but Waller never published it. And, Griffing suggests several reasons why. Letters from Waller’s colleagues at the Royal Society reveal that they weren’t huge fans. One colleague called it peculiar. Another said it would hardly be worth the work and the ink. These were all distinguished gentlemen of means who were deeply interested in natural history. They were all scientifically minded. Several of them were writing books on plants themselves. These were just the type of people you might expect to applaud such a novel idea. And yet they demurred. Why? 

Some of their letters suggest a simple but disappointing answer. These men didn’t see the need for a field guide because they already knew their botany. They were the experts of a very exclusive club. They had set up the game according to their own rules. They knew the jargon  because they had invented it. A simple and visual key wasn’t necessary because the only people who would need one were the novices, the uninitiated, the people who weren’t in the club. 

Waller’s proposed his key in 1688. After its rejection, it was largely forgotten. It would be almost another century before Jean-Baptsite Lamarck would write the first widely disseminated key to plants. The same Lamarck by the way who also proposed ingenious and influential (though discredited) mechanisms for evolution. Lamarck’s key was remarkably effective. So effective that the legend goes, he took the very first copy into the streets to find someone who knew nothing of plants, handed him a copy, and watched with satisfaction as this stranger to the botanical world figured out … for himself … the name of a strange flower. 

And in this story I see another great thing about  field guides. They democratized our knowledge of the natural world. Today, anyone with a few bucks, the ability to read, and sufficient patience can come to know all the creatures around them by name. Like public libraries and public schools they put the world’s hard-won secrets into the hands of the average person. Experts in all subjects built walls of seemingly intentionally obtuse jargon around their turf. And field guides … They’re like tunnels under the ramparts … giving us interlopers a way in. 

No One Writes a Key Alone

A field guide is a simple idea, but to make a good key, that anyone can use, is a monumental task. Many keys must include hundreds or thousands of species. First you’d need a comprehensive knowledge of your subject. Second, you must be a more than passable artist. Two skills that both take many years to master. Then, finally, once you become a dedicated bird nerd who’s good at painting, you must spend years or even decades of your life at your desk painstakinging sketching hundreds of birds with relentless precision. The making of an excellent field guide could be one of the biggest projects that a person undertakes in an entire career.  

Such a task would strain the powers of anyone. But fortunately, no one needs to build it from scratch. Consider for example how I learned about snapdragons. 

The snapdragon is a common garden flower, and it is the very first flower that I can remember learning to identify. My mother had given me a garden of my very own, a little circle cut out of the lawn just down the hill from our stone porch. We planted marigolds, and inside that a ring of snapdragons. She showed me how each blossom was a little dragon’s face whose colorful little maw would open if I squeezed its throat. Who taught her this delightful little trick? I never asked, but I like to think it was her own mother when she was a little girl. 

I imagine myself standing at the end of a long line of people that extends across the field and fades from view. Just behind me is my mother, handing me a snapdragon blossom, and behind her is my grandmother, passing a snapdragon on to my mom. And behind her … stands whoever taught my grandmother the name of this flower and showed her how to make it roar. How far back would that line extend? Generations and generations. Hundreds of years? Thousands? Does that line extend back across the sea to Spain and Portugal where the wild progenitors of snapdragons probably originated? Think about how long those strings must be! 

Every plant, rock, crawling insect, cloud, and star has a history like this. Every flower you can identify. Every animal track that you know is a string that goes back in time. Our knowledge about them has passed through the minds of many, many people before arriving in our own. And if we do right by this priceless gift, we will pass the shuttle on to the next generation. All of those threads …  woven together on this giant loom of knowledge and language. 

What a gift this is! This collective heritage of names and stories. In some ways, it is just as beautiful as the world it describes. 

One person may act as a compiler or illustrator of a field guide. But they are not the author. A field guide is always built on the collective wisdom of generations–people who have loved things enough to pay deep attention to each one. People who have noticed things like the fact that when a leaf falls, it leaves a scar on a twig. And that within that scar are other scars left by the bundle of tiny tubes that carry water and food to and from the leaves. And that the number of those bundle scars is always the same and can serve to identify a tree or shrub even in the depths of winter when twigs and bark are the only clues that you have.

A field guide is the collected repository of centuries loving attention by thousands of people. It is literally a chance to commune with the wisdom of the ancestors.

Conclusion–Answering the Skeptics

At the end of all my breathless rhapsodizing, I can hear the skeptics. “Well, that’s nice, but … so what? I mean, how much do I really need to know about birds and rocks? I don’t live out in nature. I’ve got a nice apartment in New York. The only birds I see are pigeons. The only wildlife I see are rats. If I’m hungry, I order out by Doordash. I subsist on mocha lattes and my life takes place online, with occasional forays into the real world. Why should I even care?” 

Etiquette

Well firstly, because it’s just the polite thing to do, y’all. 

When John Muir’s daughters asked him why he insisted that they learn the names of all the plants and trees and birds around them, he responded that it was a matter of etiquette and neighborliness. How would you feel if the people around you didn’t bother to learn your name?  

You’re Right

But manners aside, I have to admit that you’re right. Knowing the rattlesnake plantains won’t enhance your ability to survive. It probably won’t get you a date. (But if it does, let me just say, that sounds like a date worth going on.) In today’s world of GPS, there is no economic benefit to being able to pick out the constellations in the night sky or tell phyllite from schist. 

Anthropocentric Narcissism

But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to know these things. I think, earnestly and wholeheartedly, that you do. There is a universe out there that is bigger and wider and more surprising than the one that humans built. In our contemporary lives, our houses and our cars and our cities and our screens continually reflect back our own ambitions and our own agendas until it is so easy to believe that everything in the world is there for us. That the world’s very purpose is to fulfill our whims. But that is not the case. 

The creatures of the world exist for themselves! The rocks and stars exist for themselves! We ignore them at our own peril–if not for our continued and collective survival on the only planet we’ve got–then for our ability to escape our self-imposed anthropocentric narcissism. 

Tudge Quote

In his remarkable and inspiring book, The Variety of Life: A survey and celebration of all the creatures that have ever lived, Colin Tudge says this, “The prime motive of science is not to control the Universe but to appreciate it more fully. It is a huge privilege to live on Earth and to share it with so many goodly and fantastical creatures–albeit a privilege of which we are grotesquely careless. In truth, if we did not need to exploit other species we might simply and unimproveably spend our lives in admiration of them; they are so extraordinary.” 

Thanks 

John Souther was old when I met him. I’m sure that by now he has passed beyond the veil and his atoms have dispersed to become part of the plants that he so loved. When I knew him, I was too young, I think, to realize what a gift I’d been given when he first introduced me to Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I know that I certainly didn’t give him the thanks he deserved. But the long thread of knowledge that connects me to the wisdom of my ancestors passes first through his hands. And from there it passes through the hands of Mr. Lawrence Newcomb, who by all accounts was a quiet man who lived a life of service to the people and plants that he loved. From there, the line passes beyond where I can see. Thank you John. Thank you, Duke Newcomb. You have introduced me to so many wonderful friends. My world is better because of you. You … like the species that you spent your lives in simple and unimprovable admiration of, were extraordinary.