Reading Recommendation: “On Identification,” by Helen Macdonald, in the 19 June 2015 New York Times Magazine. 

“There’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and every time you learn to recognize a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless gray and green. …

Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen before.”

Illustration adapted from The Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of North America , 2008.