lighter nature study tools

Instead of taking field guides, I take pictures! For plants, be sure to include leaves and stems as well as flowers. I then identify them when I get home.

That doesn't work really well for birds with only a lightweight point-and-shoot camera, so for those I study up beforehand.

IMHO, a field guide that's small enough to consider taking on a backpacking trip will show only the most common of whatever it is, so you probably know what the plant/animal/bird is already. Same as when I took pocket language dictionaries to Europe–any terms I didn't know already weren't in the dictionary. If you can get an electronic version, you want something that is pretty complete for the area you'll be in. That might be hard to find! I hate bird books that grant big space to American robins, crows, and such but never have the unusual bird I just spotted!

I have a 7×18 monocular from Eagle Optics that weighs 2 oz. (without case–I keep it in a plastic ziplock instead when not in use–and with the thick cord replaced by really thin spectra cord) that I got from a birding shop in Petaluma, CA. It is much clearer than most monoculars. I looked at an 8x one but it was almost twice as heavy and not as clear! I found out that with anything stronger than 8x, I couldn't hold it steady enough to get a clear view. Your mileage, of course, may vary! As is obvious, I don't have much knowledge of optics but got the combination of clarity of detail (on the beautiful goldfinches eating from the feeders outside the store) and light weight, with more emphasis on the former.

Brunton makes the best-priced waterproof monocular around.

Another way to use your camera is to shoot pictures of pages from field guides. This probably won't help if you don't know any of the species in the area, but if there are just a few troublesome/interesting species that you want to learn, you can snap pictures of those pages and keep them on your camera with zero weight penalty.

BTW, I don't really like monoculars for watching birds, but there are some excellent compact binoculars out there. If a pair of 6.5-oz. Zeiss Victory that I love.

For the JMT this summer, I've just tried to write down any relevant natural history description on the back of each map (series of 13 maps, so I have a lot of space). I'm trying to learn to identify as many wildflowers as possible by studying a field guide. There really aren't that many species, when you come down to it. But of course, this really depends on the person and what they want to accomplish. E.g., I know people who are hard-core birders, and part of what floats their boat is adding to their personal lists of birds they've seen. They really want a field guide with them, because identifying the common species isn't enough. They're specifically interested in the rare ones.

Very good points – I was looking at some pocket guides – like the waterford press laminated folding ones, and esp. for wildflowers, I do pretty much know all of them making that pointless.

We do take a small camera, which we could document all our flowers with, but one of the rituals is spending some down time out poking around and looking stuff up and sharing our finds.

I'll have to look for collections of flower pic's which are labeled (or put labels on) – you could put those on ipod nano and just scroll through them.

Birds I'm not that interested in (or good at), and a monocular suits me fine for getting a better look at goats, sheep, big birds, and other such critters…will see what the competition is at around 2oz