Out of Range: Field Guides to the Birds of North America*

An Inconvenient Truth about White Supremacy in Birding

The first book I remember owning was the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. I read every word, memorized every name and illustration. I was especially interested in the range maps, showing where in North America each species could be seen. I remember the beauty of the artwork, the weight of the book, the texture and smell of its pages.

I haven’t picked the book up in many years, but on occasion I will see an unknown bird and its name will simply come to me. More often, birds in real life look very little like their idealized illustrations, and identifying them takes a bit more work.

For that reason, other field guides followed. I became particularly fond of the National Audubon Society guides, which featured high quality, color photographs of every species. I had not only the bird books, but also guides to mammals, reptiles, and trees.

The stack of books traveled with me on every summer road trip, to be consulted after each animal sighting, or whenever a tree needed to be identified. My mother might have occasionally regretted buying them for me when I corrected her more colloquial nomenclature: They’re not blue jays, they’re Steller’s jays — blue jays live east of the Rockies. It’s not a chipmunk, it’s a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Those aren’t pine trees, they’re Douglas firs.

I must have been a treat.

I never stopped poring over field guides and other nature books, but where I eventually took issue with both National Geographic and the Audubon Society was in their narrow definition of “North America,” which they treated as the United States and Canada only.

NatGeo has since changed the title of its book to Birds of the United States and Canada, but Audubon continues to draw an arbitrary distinction that ignores a massive, and massively biodiverse, portion of the continent. It also ignores seventh grade geography.

At the risk of pedantry, I submit the following rant:

For anyone who doesn’t scour maps like I do, North America contains twenty-three countries, including all of Central America and the Caribbean, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and Greenland. And of course, Mexico is one of North America’s three largest nations.

Central America is not a continent; rather it is a region of North America. Mexico is not part of Central America, with the possible exception of the area east of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Five US states, six Mexican states, and Cuba share the Gulf coast, while several other states are heavily influenced by its weather patterns. Thirty-three US states, eleven Mexican states, and two Canadian provinces are part of the Gulf of Mexico watershed.

The eastern side of the Yucatán Peninsula is Mexico’s Caribbean coast, while Cuba is widely considered the northernmost island in the Caribbean. Thus the two countries with which the United States shares the Gulf are also part of the Caribbean.

It’s worth noting that the southernmost part of the continental United States sits around 564 miles south of Mexico’s northernmost point. In fact Mexico reaches fewer than 700 miles farther south than the continental US.

Much of the United States is closer to Central America than to Canada. My home in Texas is roughly the same distance from Canada as it is from Panama — Central America’s most distant country.

Florida is only about 90 miles from Cuba. The Bahamas are only 50 miles from the Florida coast in some spots, and that’s 50 miles east, not south — Grand Bahama has roughly the same latitude as West Palm Beach.

This is all to say that these are not faraway, separate places. We are one continent. We are inextricably connected. Birds know this, even if some of us do not.

More than a third of the bird species in the United States and Canada migrate here from Latin America and the Caribbean. Others have year-round ranges that extend past our southern border. I recall feeling surprised, and then a little stupid, the first time I saw a northern cardinal in southern Mexico.

Of the nearly 700 native bird species in Texas alone, all but eighteen are also found in Mexico or the Caribbean, or were historically found there. That’s over 97 percent. California has the most bird species in the nation, about 75 percent of which are also found in Mexico.

Mexico has over a hundred endemic birds — species found nowhere else on earth. Puerto Rico has almost twenty. The entire continental US? Fifteen. Despite its enormous land mass, Canada has no endemic birds.

Mexico and Central America are home to more than ten percent of the entire world’s bird species, despite comprising less than two percent of its land mass.

Panama alone hosts more bird species than the US and Canada combined, on a narrow isthmus smaller than South Carolina, making it acre-for-acre one of the most biodiverse nations on Earth. Costa Rica is similarly species-dense.

I could go on … and on … but instead I’ll simply say that the most ecologically rich parts of our continent are the parts that the nature guides are ignoring.

It’s easy to think the omission has little to do with wildlife, and more to do with the people who live, or don’t live, in those disregarded places.

Is Audubon is ‘othering’ about twelve percent of the continent, which also happens to be home to about twelve percent of the entire world’s biodiversity — you know, the thing they’re supposed to care most about?

Several years ago I contacted Audubon about this and to their credit, I received a response. I was told they simply didn’t have the resources to produce guides for those regions. They assured me that it had nothing to do with race, or culture, or the prevalence of spicy food.

But they do have teams working there, as they continue to publish data for regions that are much larger, much more remote, and much less ecologically significant.

There are Alaskan islands so remote that they’re much closer to Asia than to the North American mainland. They’re rightfully included in the guides.

So I’m left still questioning their priorities, and I’m frustrated, because I’d really like an Audubon field guide to the birds of the whole continent.

Given that every one of the seventy-plus bird species I’ve identified so far on my own property spends at least part of the year in Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean (at least 24 of them even range into South America) — I think I’m being reasonable.