“Ask Rick Wright”—Thoughts on Being Birderly

A quasi-review by Ted Floyd

Peterson Reference Guide to Sparrows of North America, by Rick Wright

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019

434 pages, hardcover

ABA Sales–Buteo Books 14934

As I was sitting down to write this not-exactly-a-book-review, one of my kids asked me a question about the mathematical details of the orbit of the moon. I didn’t have the answer handy. What to do? “Ask Rick Wright” was her automatic response.

Hours earlier, I had been on the phone with an ABA colleague, Sales & Marketing Director John Lowry. We’d wandered onto the topic of vagrancy, and neither of us could remember the particulars of when the such-and-such sandpiper strayed to some beach on the Great Lakes. But if we’d seriously needed the answer, John knew what to do: “Ask Rick Wright.”

Rick Wright knows everything about birds. I’m not necessarily saying Rick’s the world’s best “field birder,” although he’s right up there with the greats. And I’m certainly not saying he’s our finest ornithological illustrator. I don’t think he can draw anything at all. But when it comes to knowledge about birds, Rick is in a league of his own. Rick is the foremost “public intellectual” in contemporary birding.

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