Contributing Editor David Allen Sibley has done it again.

Nine years after the appearance of his widely acclaimed The Sibley Guide to Birds, the book that changed the way we birdwatchers look at our field guides, he has turned his attention to the second most beloved member of the birder's world -- the tree. The result is "a tree guide for birdwatchers" (his words), The Sibley Guide to Trees.

Does it deserve a spot in your backpack along with the Guide to Birds? To find out, and to learn why a celebrated author who spent ten years preparing a bird book would devote seven to trees, I interviewed David in late August. The interview is available in three parts.

In Part 2, Sibley tells why there are few paintings of whole trees (and no botanical keys) in his new book; he describes why readers of the tree guide should be able to use it the same way a birdwatcher uses the bird guide; and he characterizes the reaction the tree book has received from his close birding friends. Go to Part 2.

In Part 3, Sibley compares working on the tree guide with working on the Guide to Birds; he tells why he used acrylics instead of the opaque watercolors he used for the Guide to Birds; and he explains why birdwatchers are the people he expects will buy the tree guide. Go to Part 3.

Part 1 appears below:

David, thank you for talking to me today. Could you please give me an overview of The Sibley Guide to Trees?

Well, it’s, I don’t know all the fact and figures about it, but it took seven years to produce. I started working on it just after the bird guides were finished and spent most of that time working on the paintings. A couple years of research and a few years of painting and about a year of writing and editing, that’s probably how it all breaks down.

And where did the idea for the book come from?

You know, if you had asked me 10 years ago if I thought I would do a guide to trees, I would have said no. No way. It just wasn’t something I ever expected to do. But once I finished the bird guide, I was really interested in doing another big project and another identification project, a field guide. I just like the whole process, the whole challenge of learning about things, drawing them, and compiling all that into some organized format. So I started looking around. Rather than doing something more in depth about some group of birds, I looked around for some other topic, some other group of species to work on, and for a couple of reasons, trees came to the top of that list.

First of all, they’re just around all the time. We see them every day. When I was thinking about all this, I was out doing a book-signing tour, so traveling from Chicago to Denver to San Francisco, and no matter where I went, every day, if I had an hour free, I could go out and go for a walk, and even if it was just around a couple city blocks, I would see a bunch of trees. They are a very easy thing to study and to work with.

Did you give any thought to doing a guide to birds for a different region of the world, say, for Mexico or East Africa or Europe?

Yeah, I did think about that, and I rejected the idea. I really like to dig in and get to know the things that I’m painting and working with.

To prepare a guide to the birds of a different country, I would feel like I really needed to live there to be able to see at least the common species, to see them every day and really get to know them. Trees appealed to me because I could see them every day, all day. I could look outside my windows at my house and see them. I see them as I’m dropping the kids off at school.

Doing a guide to something like the birds of Europe, I could travel there and find all the species and see them, but I wouldn’t have that overall familiarity that comes from seeing them 365 days a year in all seasons, in all weather. That was the main reason that I didn’t try to do a guide to the birds of another country.

I remember an article by E. Vernon Laux that appeared in the New York Times when The Sibley Guide to Birds came out. He wrote: “Many people, this writer included, did not see the need for another guide to North American birds. It shows how wrong one can be.” And I wonder, do you have a similar sense of need now? What is the need for a guide to North American trees?

Well, the other reason that I settled on trees is that I thought there’s a lot of interest in trees, and even though I never expected to do a guide to trees, I’ve always been interested. I own a bunch of tree guides, and I’ve always tried to learn something about them. But I felt like there was really room for improvement, room for me to make a real contribution to tree identification by taking it in a different direction.

Bird guides have advanced tremendously in the last 80 years. A hundred years ago, bird identification was done in the hand mostly. You would shoot the bird and study details like bill shape or the pattern of scaling on the legs, things like that. Gradually, it’s become more and more of a looking at birds at a distance and identifying them by holistic, sort of gestalt combination of features.

Trees, I’m sure, partly because they’re so easy to approach -- if you want to identify a tree, you can just walk up to it and pull out your hand lens and with 20x magnification look at the shape of the bud scales or whether there are hairs on the underside of the leaf or all these other details. So tree guides haven’t really advanced beyond that style of identification.

What I wanted to do was create a tree guide that would work with the more modern birding style of identification: identifying trees from a distance by their overall look, by a combination of features, so that a birder who is out looking at birds can just turn their binoculars onto the trees from 50 yards away and identify those too.

I wonder if you’ve ever been in a group of birders when someone in the group sees a bird, and someone asks, “Oh, where is it?” and they say, “It’s in the tree,” and you ask, “Which tree?” And they answer, “It’s the green tree.”

Yes, I’ve been there many, many, many times. And in the same way, you can be in a group of people with someone who really knows trees, and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s in the elm,” and they’re the only person in the group who knows what the elm is.

Was this a part of the reason for this book?

[Laughs] To make bird-spotting easier?

Yes.

Not really. I mean, it would be great if people learned enough about trees so that that was actually a possibility. I guess I did it mostly just because, well, like the bird guide, it’s a personal thing. I’m creating the book that I want, and then mostly just hoping to make it easier for people to learn the names of the trees and get to know them and increase their appreciation for them that way.

Studying birds or trees or anything like that all begins with figuring out what the name is. It’s the same way if you walk into a room full of people that you don’t know. You start talking to people and learning. You learn their names and then you learn, oh, you’re Joe’s son or you’re Joe’s daughter. You make those connections. You learn the stories. And it’s all connected to that name.

In the introduction, you write, referring to taxonomy: “The networked structure of relationships becomes clearer and more well defined the more we learn, and in that process of discovery and understanding lies the real pleasure of the study of nature.” I see that as a real similarity between this book and the Guide to Birds, and I wonder if these are more than ID books, that they’re almost lifestyle books? The reason I ask is that we live in a world where everything happens very fast. And yet what these books propose is a long period of careful observation.

Certainly, where I find my pleasure and satisfaction in nature study is really getting to know the deeper connections -- sort of like a genealogy, family-history study, but of birds and trees instead of the family -- knowing something about each species and having some kind of bigger framework to put that information into, understanding the bigger patterns. That is what I’m encouraging people to do. Just getting people outside and experiencing things, real things, outdoors and the cycles of nature, that’s the ultimate goal of anybody who does this kind of work.

You mentioned that you made the Guide to Trees the way you wanted it. I read something that referred to the Guide to Birds as “the field guide you had always wanted.” Is it fair to compare the two?

Yeah, that’s what I said about the Guide to Birds, and it’s the same with the trees. There are endless decisions to be made when you’re producing a field guide -- what to include and what to leave out, how to arrange things on the page, what size to make everything, how many words to allow for the description of habitat. All those decisions were guided by what I thought I would like to have in a book.

Well, I guess... You know I should... That’s not exactly true. [Laughs] Certainly with the Guide to Birds, my own expertise had gone well beyond the field guide, so I’m thinking back to where I was as a novice or semi-experienced birder, thinking back to what I would have liked to have had then.

With the trees, I still don’t consider myself an expert on trees. I was learning new things every day right up to the day the book went to print. So the tree book is really, even more directly than the bird guide is, the field guide that I want for myself. I’m looking forward to carrying it around in the field now and actually using it, seeing how it works and learning more about the trees.

Do you consider yourself an expert on other tree books?

Well, I’ve certainly read and referred to and used most of them, so yeah, I guess I’ve had quite a bit of experience with tree books over the last seven years.

How was the Guide to Trees shaped by your experiences with other tree guides?

I think there’s a lot of influence from other books in all kinds of ways. When I started working, thinking about the bird guide -- and the same when I stated thinking about the tree guide -- one of the first things I did was to get all the field guides that I could and study them and use them in the field, just to test, to see what worked, what was really helpful and what wasn’t, and what would make the book easier to use, what I found frustrating, and try to come up with a solution to the problems in a way to include all the features that I really liked. It’s a great benefit to have a lot of books that other people have already put a lot of work into, to be able to look at those and take inspiration and pursue the trial-and-error process of publishing.

Can you give me some examples of things you tried and decided not to include in your book?

In some of the early paintings that I did for the tree guide, I was painting a whole branch, a twig, maybe about, say, a one-foot-long section of a twig with leaves attached with fruit or flowers and the leaves hanging naturally, as if it was just a side view of that little twig in real life. There are differences between species and groups in the way leaves hang from the twig, and that was one of the things I wanted to illustrate. But I found that doing those illustrations was too time-consuming and too involved. And there wasn’t enough room in the book to show that, and it didn’t show the leaf shape as clearly as I wanted. I couldn’t show the upper side and under side of a leaf clearly without twisting some of the leaves around, and that started looking really artificial. So even though I had started out thinking about more artistic, more natural-looking illustrations of the leaves and branches, I ended up simplifying that to these more diagrammatic, two-dimensional views of leaves, leaf shape, and then separately fruit and a winter twig. And for a lot of species, I did end up putting in a little vignette of a leafy twig showing how the leaves hang from the twig, but the two-dimensional, flat, profile views of leaves became the centerpiece of each species, not the leafy twig.

This is Part 1 of a three-part interview. Go to Part 2. Go to Part 3.

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