Ancient Web: Birdmom Turned Sierra Wildflowers into a Color-Coded Field Guide

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Birdmom's name tells you what its author used to watch. Its greatest surviving reference, though, is about flowers—partly because flowers are considerate enough to stay still for photographs.

Visit Sharon Nixon's Birdmom website.

Sharon L. Nixon describes twenty-five years of birdwatching before changes in her vision and hearing pushed her toward the wildflowers of the Sierra Nevada foothills. Her home near Coarsegold, California, provided a workable field laboratory. Instead of hiding her lack of formal botanical training, she openly describes learning one plant at a time and correcting mistakes as visitors help identify specimens.

The Wildflower Index, revised in January 2014, is the real achievement. It alphabetizes common and Latin names, gives plant families, and links to pages grouped by flower color. Someone who has found an unfamiliar purple flower may not know its genus, so a color-coded route makes more sense than demanding scientific vocabulary at the entrance.

A field guide built for the connection people had

Nixon explains that flowers with several colors are cross-listed instead of forced into a single category. Plants awaiting identification receive provisional codes such as W03 or Pu01, which may disappear from the unknown list when she learns what they are. That convention makes the guide's growth visible.

The index also says many original photographs came from the 120 acres of Park Sierra or nearby natural areas, including images taken by Chuck Epperly in the exceptional 1999 season that began the project. The compiled index contains numerous synonyms, making it usable even when a visitor knows only one local name.

Then there is an unusually revealing technical compromise. Nixon deliberately kept images small for dial-up visitors. She offers to email higher-resolution originals on request, acknowledging that large color galleries could otherwise become painfully slow.

Beyond flowers, the homepage links to birds, wildlife, gardening, travel, family, crafts, and her former work as a copyeditor. It retains old guestbook links and credits Arachnophilia and Microsoft FrontPage as site-building tools.

Some identifications may be mistaken or outdated, as the author herself warns. That openness makes the collection more interesting as a developing personal field guide rather than a claim of professional taxonomic authority.

Explore the wildflower index and its color system.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.