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I have thousands of ferns growing wild here. Wish you were here to identify some of them. There's a stand of Dennstaedtia punctilobula so dense you couldn't hack your way through it; I leave it for the family of rabbits living in it (it's conveniently near the savoyed Swiss chard they so love). The cinnamon fern is especially magnificent. The ostrich and sensitive and interrupted are of course unmistakable, but there are woodland species here and there that I just can't nail even with guide in hand. However do you do it?

Hi aristo
I haven't ever tried US ferns, and the Fern Expert has only ferned in Costa Rica (superb, apparently).
The Fern Expert grows ostrich fern, cinnamon fern and sensitive fern, but we don't know interrrupted (Osmunda claytonia?) - though we may have seen it at Brantwood in the Lake District last week
There are American Fern societies as well as the British one that the FE is involved with. See:
www.hardyferns.org
(Sue Olsen's site; we have met her on trips)
www.amerfernsoc.org
And the British one is:
www.eBPS.org.uk
There is a cheap(ish) guide to British ferns available from the BPS, so there might be similar publications from the US societies for the US

Sorry - I missed the "guide in hand". Which guide do you use?

I have a number of guides. The one I most rely on is Farida Wiley's little gem, Ferns of Northeastern United States, which is available as a cheap Dover reprint and fits in your pocket. It was published in 1936, so many of the Latin names have changed of course, but it's very nicely set up, with the vascular bundles at the back along with a sort of step-by-step identifying process. Nonetheless, I find it very hard to distinguish between one Dryopteris and another. I suppose that's true of most people though...

FE says "start with the number of times it is divided" (into pinnae, pinnules etc.)
If you like, you could send us a photo (though, as I said, USA ferns are not the FE's area of expertise).
(If you would like to do that, contact les40 for my Email address - better than me giving it on an open site.)

Hate to put them on the operating table- you know, the Audubon route: killing something to find out what it is. I should be happy just to see them being happily unmolested. They don't answer to their names anyway. Lovely things, aren't they?

Yes indeed.
It is generally only necessary to pick a frond from the very smallest to get a closer look (the larger ones you can just turn over a frond without having to remove it), and then only one frond from a healthy plant - it should very soon recover!

Cutting open a drum to see whence comes the sound. :)

Nice analogy.

When I started bird-watching, I wondered how the early ornithologists were able to supply such detailed measurements of birds. The Audubon approach, as you say.

shotgun: early binoculars