Long-legged, sharp-eyed, no warbler

Joaquin Leyva, a Bay Area cabinet maker, has spent the morning watching birds at the Charleston Slough. He’s seen thousands of ducks -- widgeons and teals, mergansers and grebes -- and all the shore birds he could hope for. But his best sighting comes as he heads back to his car.

He stops, looks carefully, unbelieving at first. Then he approaches the tall, thin, spectacled man walking toward him on the path.

“David Sibley?” he asks. Without waiting for confirmation, he drops his backpack, pulls out a large, well-thumbed book and addresses the master. “Fifteen years ago, I gave up my Christian religion. Now being in the outdoors fills my spiritual needs. And your books....” He trails off, leaving the obvious unsaid.

For those whose religion is nature -- particularly birds -- the book Leyva holds out to be autographed, “Sibley’s Guide to Birds,” is nothing short of a bible.

Like other North American field guides, Sibley’s catalogs the birds of the continent, with illustrations to aid in identification. But “Sibley’s Guide to Birds” has gone further than anything that came before it. It has changed the way people watch birds -- and the way publishers think of bird books.

Sibley’s guide has sold more than 650,000 copies since its release in 2000. Two other popular books followed, “The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior” and “Sibley’s Birding Basics.” Later this month, Knopf will release updated versions of the field guide, split into two volumes, one for the birds of Western North America and one for Eastern North America. The new, smaller books aim to address one of the few complaints bird watchers have with the first one: its size.

Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, expects that the new editions will be easier to carry into the field but, he cautions, “the problem with a regional guide is that birds have wings. And they use them. They’re always turning up places they’re not supposed to be.” He is enthusiastic, however, about the original guide: “It’s phenomenal. Only someone who’d been observing and drawing birds since childhood could have done this.”

Sibley, the son of ornithologist Fred Sibley, did grow up around birds, observing and drawing them from the age of 7. By 12, he had developed strong feelings about what was missing from field guides and had begun planning one of his own. “I could see a bird in the field, and it looked nothing like the bird in the guide,” he recalls. “I thought a lot about how to do it better.”

One way field guides frequently fail birders is they have too few pictures of each species. Birds’ plumages, even within a species, can vary widely in appearance. There are regional variations. A bird in flight looks nothing like a perched bird. Juveniles look different from adults, males look different from females. And there’s the seasonal thing: In spring, hormones bring about remarkable color changes, infusing drab feathers with gaudy hues. Sibley began thinking about a guide that would show each species of bird in each of its possible plumages.

After high school, he headed to Cornell University, which has one of the best ornithology programs in the country. But once there, he chafed at the many requirements that had nothing to do with his goals. “I knew what I wanted to do,” Sibley recalls. “I wanted be out in the field learning how to identify and paint birds. If that had fit into college, it would have been in an ornithology department. But once I got there, I realized it wasn’t for me.”

So, in 1980, Sibley dropped out and traveled around North America. He found seasonal employment as a hawk counter at the Cape May Bird Observatory, and worked sometimes as a guide on birding tours and sold the occasional piece of art. But mostly he watched birds. “I lived very cheaply. I had a camper van and found free places to live where I could,” he says.

Things got more complicated when, working as an intern at the Manomet Bird Observatory in Massachusetts in 1983, he met Joan Walsh, the woman who would become his wife. He continued to travel the continent observing birds, but now he also plotted ways to spend time with her.

An avid birder who worked on a variety of avian research projects during their courtship and also pursued a master’s degree in ornithology at the University of Georgia, where she studied Wood Storks, Walsh says she knew from the beginning what she was getting into. “It was very clear if you knew David well that this [field guide] was going to be done,” she recalls. “It wasn’t clear what kind of commercial success it would have, but it was going to be born.”

It wasn’t until 1988, though, that Sibley felt he knew enough to begin working on his guide in earnest. It took six more years to come up with a page design he found workable and to get a commitment from Chanticleer Press to publish the book when it was finished.

Contract in hand, Sibley then spent six more years in a New Jersey studio painting, working primarily from notes, photographs and sketches he’d made in the field. Some birds were more problematic than others -- particularly the birds he knew best. Rock Doves, or pigeons as they’re more commonly known, were among the most difficult. “I’ve seen them so many times under so many circumstances,” Sibley says, “that I found it hard to condense my knowledge of them into a few illustrations.”

Sibley has ambivalent feelings about the reaction to his book. On the one hand, he says, “I would have been disappointed if people hadn’t thought my book was important.” But, on the other, he’s been overwhelmed by just how popular the book -- and by extension Sibley himself -- has become.

His wife is more practical. “It’s just lucky that he didn’t instead have a deep interest in fungi,” she says. “If he’d spent all those years writing a field guide to North American fungi, he’d probably have to now be asking people ‘Would you like fries with that?’ in order to make ends meet.

OK, so there is the limo

On a trip to California last fall, Sibley rose early one morning to walk with members of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society prior to a breakfast and book signing. Those invited on the walk were the club’s serious birders, the kind of people with whom Sibley often went into the field during his days as a full-time bird observer. But the relationship is no longer one of near-equals.

Sibley arrives by limousine, courtesy of his publisher. He is gracious, shaking hands all around, but clearly uncomfortable being the center of attention. During a brief but adulatory introduction by the group’s executive director, Craig Breon, he stares at the ground. It is only later, in a meadow by an oak tree, that he begins to relax. There is movement in the tree, but the birds are too deep inside to identify, and so he stops, puckers his lips and begins to “pish,” making the raspy sound a distressed chickadee might make if a hawk or other threat were in the area. “Birds approach to see what’s going on and join in scolding the predator,” Sibley wrote about the technique in “Birding Basics.” It works exactly as described. Within seconds, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet peeks out to assess the threat, followed quickly by three Chestnut-backed Chickadees and an Oak Titmouse.

But this isn’t just a group of birders out for a morning look-see. Although it’s a pleasant and confident bunch, all are aware of the master in their midst. They’re acting the way a garage band might if it were jamming with Eric Clapton. When Sibley pishes, the others stand back attentively. Later, when a spotting scope is trained on a Northern Flicker in a tree at the edge of a meadow, the group backs off to give Sibley the first glimpse.

At the edges of the group, the birders talk about Sibley and his books in reverential whispers. “It would be enough of an accomplishment if he only drew,” says Audubon chapter board member Dave Drake. “But his left-brain skills are as remarkable as his right-brain ones.”

“I love [‘The Sibley Guide to Birds’] so much I don’t take it out in the field with me,” says Bobbie Handen, who chairs the chapter’s education committee. “I can’t bear to mess it up.” Leda Beth Gray has no such qualms. “I had to get a bigger belt pack to be able to carry it into the field,” she says.

After the walk, Sibley talks about his newfound fame. “If I’d always wanted to be a musician and suddenly I was a rock star, that would be one thing,” he says. “But nobody goes into birding for the fame.” He speaks almost wistfully of the days when he spent most of his time in the field peering through binoculars. “I don’t get to do as much of that as I’d like anymore,” he says.

Sibley’s place in the world of birding is most often compared to that of two almost mythic figures: John James Audubon, the 19th century naturalist and artist who traveled the country attempting to document the variety of bird life in North America, and Roger Tory Peterson, who wrote the most comprehensive field guides of the 20th century. But while Sibley is flattered by the comparisons, he is trying, he says, to do something very different.

Audubon’s paintings are works of art; they idealize rather than document. Sibley’s paintings, by comparison, seem almost crude, containing only the essential lines and colors that define a species.

Peterson, who died in 1996, was a personality as much as a naturalist. He relished his role as “Great Man” of birding, speaking, writing and attending events around the world, assuming and happily accepting homage from acolytes wherever he went.

Sibley never craved celebrity. He set out to write the field guide he’d always wanted to use, and now he’s done that. He’ll continue refining it -- the new Western and Eastern guides have additional notes, revised maps and other improvements -- but in some sense, Sibley says, he knows his most important work is behind him. “I really don’t expect anything to inspire me again the way the field guide did,” he says.

Still, there are a lot of birds to see, and sometimes, even now, Sibley has the opportunity to be just another guy who likes to look at them.

After several hours of birding the Charleston Slough, he has to get back to his hotel to prepare for an evening reading at a Bay Area bookstore. He stops to scan a pond a hundred yards from the car. Someone else is looking in the same direction, through a telescope, at a slender gray shorebird perched on a dock railing. The man peers through the scope, then down at an open copy of “Sibley’s Guide to Birds,” then back through the scope. Finally, he takes in that other birders have come along.

“Can you guys help me?” he asks, gesturing toward the bird. “Is that a Greater Yellowlegs?”

Sibley sizes up the bird in an instant, then answers, “Yep. Greater Yellowlegs.”