The Sibley Guide to Trees
Naturalist David Sibley, like Tory Peterson before him, made his reputation painting and annotating birds before expanding to other biological realms. Sibley's guides to birds and bird behavior (recommended on Cool Tools) are the best all-around guides to the birds of North America. Sibley's beats out Peterson's, and the dozens of others published today. Sibley's newest book, also written and illustrated by him, is the best all-around guide to the trees of North America, again displacing the many other field guides to trees in print.
Sibley's illustrations are clear, crisp, and accurate. He manages to maintain distinctions in tree types where species get fuzzy, like in the oaks, or firs. His maps are specific. He includes more parts of the tree than most guides -- buds, bark, branches, seeds, silhouettes, flowers, cones, etc. -- which really help in identification. And he includes not only native trees but many feral varieties, and even widely planted ornamentals. One detail I appreciate: he lists alternative common names to trees, since trees seem to have local names.
With Sibley's guide I've been able to identify more trees than with other guides. However the book is big, not at all pocketable, or the kind of thing you are likely to take with you into the field on a hike. Perhaps future editions might remedy this. I use this quality softcover edition (a delight to browse) by taking samples and photos outside and returning home to identify.
Available from Amazon
*
Favorite (15)
Comments
Leave a comment
A cool tool is anything useful that is superior to comparable items. If you think this tool is inferior suggest a better one. You are welcome to insult a tool, but comments containing insults to individual people will be deleted. Corrections of fact are always welcomed, if stated politely. Recommendations of better tools are dearly wanted and may be elevated to the front page.
cedarman
If his publishers follow the same marketing plan with this book that they did with his bird guides, they'll break this into separate East and West tree books in a year or so. Those books will be smaller and easier to pocket, and they'll sell a lot more of them.
Haven't seen this yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
David Hull
I would also suggest the Pacific Coast Tree Finder by Tom Watts. It's organized like a flowchart or a 20 questions game to help you identify a tree. Its weakness is probably that it has relatively few trees, but it's small and cheap (64 pages, $4). Guides for other regions are also available.
Paolo Marino
Nifty. Can anyone suggest a similar book for European trees?
thom
I have not seen the book and so my comment is a little off the subject of identification. What I am interested in as much as identification is an old tree Ent's knowledge written down in book form on how to take care of trees; not just disease identification but an in depth knowledge of life cycle, nutrition, and a little history of what the tree's parts were used for before the rush to automobiles. If it were slanted toward organic, what I like to call "old school", farming techniques, that would be even more better.
CR Banks
As an alternative to the small, pocketable book size, perhaps they will produce an edition for Kindle soon. There are a few Kindle books out there that are tree related, though none that sounds as detailed and well designed as The Silbey Guide to Trees.
I'll definitely have to buy this book.
Rick
There is no way to key down a tree. E.g. beginning with a leaf type go to the leaf spacing etc.. It is essentially just a list of trees organized by tree type. You have to search though all the pages if you are trying to find the name of a tree given some characteristics of the tree.
Rick
A Nonym
To #4/Thom - The best in-depth tree care book you'll find is "Modern Arboriculture" by Shigo.
It's might be too in-depth for your question, but it's an astonishing book.
Nick
I agree with CR Banks that an ebook version would be great, it would enable portability & also avoid pulping erm... trees.
brad
@Rick (comment #6): This is probably best thought of as a tree ID guide for birders, because it was written and illustrated by a person who was a birder first. Bird guides don't use keys because keys are too slow for a mobile being like a bird: by the time you got through the key the bird you were trying to ID would be long gone. A naturalist friend of mine used to say she preferred birds to plants because "plants sit there and defy you to be identified, whereas birds just fly away and you can forget about them." Keys are great for immovable objects like trees, but if you're a birder you won't have much use for a key unless you're a bird-bander or someone who works in a museum cataloguing stuffed specimens.
The Sibley guide takes the same approach to trees as almost all bird guides take to birds: it groups them by family. So, for example, once you learn the basic differences between warblers, finches, thrushes, woodpeckers, etc., and you become familiar with where they're located in the guide (which is constant for nearly all bird guides; it's based on the evolutionary age of the group with the oldest groups first and the newest last), it takes no time at all to find the appropriate section of the guide and figure out what species you're looking at.
The Peterson guide to wildflowers took a similar approach, organizing flowers by color and then by family (using the same evolutionary age approach to organization). Newcombe's wildflower guide used a key approach, and was favored by botanists, but birders tended to go with Peterson's since it paralleled the approach they used to identify birds.
So I think Sibley's book might seem a strange approach to botanists, who have the luxury of time to key out trees, but birders will find it much faster than using a key.