“The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!’”

—Pres. John F. Kennedy, Address at the University of California at Berkeley, March 23, 1962

My business partner Charles Nix and I have spent most of the past three years completing two complicated books: The Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd and The Sibley Guide to Trees by David Sibley. The bird guide is the latest (and we hope the best) photographic reference to North American avifauna and contains some 2,200 photos and 700 range maps. Add to that more than a hundred-thousand words of text and you can guess that it was a lot of work for our team that put the book together. David Sibley’s tree book has over 4,100 paintings—all painted by David himself—and over 600 range maps, plus more than a hundred-thousand words of text. Again, loads of work to make it all into a book.

I’ve been thinking about the time involved in these books. For an editor, it’s the type of work where one spends weekends in the office and 14 hour days during the week going over galley pages and writing e-mails, and fretting over where to place semi-colons—all with the hope that the book gets done on time. But my time pales in the blinding light of the total time spent by the people who created the content. With the help of the powerful new Wolfram|Alpha (or a calculator and a pencil, if you like) time is quickly laid bare. Take the tree guide:

4,190 paintings @ approx. 60 minutes each = 174.6 days = 24.94 weeks =.4783 years

Wrap your noodle around sitting down and painting leaves, bark, fruit, twigs, cones, catkins, branches, flowers, full trees, etc. non-stop for 5 months, 22 days and 12 hours. No bathroom breaks or stopping for a sandwich and a nap. Get back to work, you’re going to spend 251,400 minutes…painting. That’s not what David did, of course. He worked on the paintings over about four years, but that’s the best calculus of the time we can create for him actually having a brush and a pencil in his hand.

This math does not even approach the research time to actually go out and look at trees and collect samples and compare them to books and to discuss venation patterns with botanists and the other dozens of things you need to do to get the painting right. So, four years is fast. And, here’s the kicker: He wrote all the text of the book, too.

The photographer with the most images in the Smithsonian Guide to Birds is named Brian Small. He has 974 crisp beautiful images of birds in the book. He submitted many more, but as far as I can tell, he doesn’t take a bad photo, so about half the photos in the book came from his labors. Imagine! Of the more than 700 species of birds covered in the guide, his images account for 44 percent of the total. Dozens and dozens of other contributors made up the remaining excellent images in the book.

Now the calculus for Brian’s time is tricky, too. If we omit the years of experience simply observing birds and the non-calculable aesthetic sensibility involved in composing a beautiful photo, we can still account for his time in a fairly reasonable way. First, he needs to go out and actually find the subject and wait for it to sit on a tree branch or rock or fencepost or fly over him so he can take the photo. He needs to get to the right place at just the right time and be stealthy and observant and almost predator-like to get his shot. Sure, some birds are common, so American Robin and Canada Goose don’t take as long to find or photograph as say, a perfect shot of a Mourning Warbler by a rather large factor of time. Then there is luck. A Gilded Flicker assumes the perfect pose at just the right time and you have your shot. So, factor s (serendipity) is difficult to apply to the math of this situation. If we proceed to do the sums based on travel time and sitting-in-a-blind time and editing the photos and post-processing it for press, I reckon 3.5 hours per image makes sense.

974 photos @ approx. 3.5 hours each = 142 days = 20.29 weeks = 0.389 years = 4 months, 20 days and 8 hours

If you consider that these 974 photos are just a tiny fraction of the total number of images that Brian has taken and published in books over the past 20 years (by a factor of 20 or more) then you start to imagine that time means something else to people who are so singularly passionate about things like birds and trees (or making complicated books for that matter).

David and Brian both have a type of genius. It didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, either. They put in the time.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 6:59 am and is filed under trees, birds, birding, time, Scott & Nix, David Sibley, Brian Small, Ted Floyd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.