Bird Watching For Beginners – Part One
Bird Watching For Beginners – Part Two
Identifying Birds:
There are hundreds of different birds out there. You probably won’t be able to identify every single bird you see. However, armed with some basic information, you can probably narrow down the list and find that you might have a species worth studying.
What should you look for when identifying birds?
Becoming an expert on visual identification takes time and patience. Some groups of birds are much easier to definitively identify than others. The first thing to remember is: don’t make bird identification hard on yourself. There are two general rules to keep in mind during your first few months of bird watching:
1) Eliminate as many species as possible from consideration before you ever attempt to identify anything.
2) The bird is most likely a species that commonly occurs in your area, not some strange exotic that blew in from a thousand miles away.
One of the easiest ways to exclude birds is to go through your field guide and put an “X” next to those that do not typically occur in your geographic area. Put these aside for the time being. By doing this, you drastically reduce the number of birds you have to worry about identifying from the 900 birds in your guide to the 300 or so birds that are regularly seen in your location!
By the way, don’t worry about marking up your field guide. A field guide personally adjusted to meet your needs is the best friend you can have when alone in the field. Just make sure to use a pencil or permanent ink so that the words won’t smear if you leave the book in the rain or drop it in the mud occasionally.
Another way to eliminate choices is to consider the time of year the bird might occur in your area. The range maps included with field guides display this type of information. Some beginners might even find it beneficial to place colored dots next to birds in their field guides. For example, put a red dot next to birds that are year round residents, put a blue dot next to birds that are only winter visitors, put a green dot next to birds that are summer visitors, and put a black dot next to birds that only pass through during migration.
CLUES TO IDENTIFICATION
The way that some birds skulk about, you’d think that they were afraid of showing off their pretty colors and didn’t want anyone to identify them. And this is the case, no doubt, as they must somehow evade predators from both above and below. Often, their quick movements allow us only a glimpse. Still, you will be able to identify even the most secretive bird using the key clues to identification described here.
There are five basic clues you can look and listen for that will allow you to solve the bird identification puzzle:
1) the bird’s silhouette
2) its plumage and coloration
3) its behavior
4) its habitat preferences
5) its voice.
This may seem like a formidable amount of information to gather, but in truth you often need only one or two of these clues to identify a bird. Sometimes, the key to identification is as easy as knowing which clue to look for first when you see an unusual bird. As your birding abilities increase, you will be able to pinpoint the important clues with greater ease and certainty.
Silhouette – Shape and Size
As you become familiar with your field guide, you will be able to quickly categorize most birds into families using silhouette alone (remember, each family has a diagnostic shape and size). This will immediately put you at an advantage compared to the average observer because by placing the bird you see into a particular family, you have already narrowed down the possible birds you could be seeing from the 900 in your field guide to only about 15 or so birds – the 15 birds within the family you have identified.
As mentioned earlier, you can then further eliminate any species in the family that do not occur in your region during that season. You can do this even in the worst of lighting conditions when birds are back lit, in low light, or in shadow. It doesn’t matter. The overall shape is unchanged. Many birds are even identifiable to species by outline alone.
Of course, it will not be easy to accomplish this feat at first. You must learn to note carefully all the details of a bird’s shape. Is the bird large or small, short-legged or long legged, crested or not crested, plump or slim and sleek, short-tailed or long-tailed? Note every detail in your field notebook.
The shape of a bird’s bill is also an extremely helpful clue that is obvious from a silhouette. Cardinals, finches, and sparrows have short conical bills. Woodpeckers have chisel-shaped bills for working dead wood. Hawks, eagles, and falcons, on the other hand, have sharp, hooked bills that make quick work of meat. Shorebirds have slender bills of all lengths for probing at different depths into the sand. The beak is a telltale sign. It indicates whether the bird cracks seeds (short, thick beak), drills for grubs (long, pointed beak), picks stuff off leaves (short, thin beak), and so forth.
Your bird guide can help you identify beak shapes. Size is also an important field mark and field guides do list the size of birds next to pictures. However, if you don’t have some type of scale in mind, these numbers are of little use. The “ruler” many birders use in the field is a mental association of three familiar birds with three general size classes.
For example, a house sparrow is 5-6 inches in size, a northern mockingbird is 9-11 inches in size, and an American crow is 17-21 inches in size. Now, using phrases like “larger than a crow” or “smaller than a sparrow,” you have an immediate impression of the approximate size of any bird. You also have an immediate frame of reference for your field guide if you associate each of these three species with 5, 10, and 20-inch size classes.
Plumage
Plumage characteristics are what really draw a lot of people into bird watching – they like seeing those beautiful colors. The distinguishing plumage clues that identify different species are known as “field marks.” These include such things as breast spots, wing bars (thin lines along the wings), eye rings (circles around the eyes), eyebrows (lines over the eyes), eye lines (lines through the eyes) and many others.
Some field marks are best seen when a bird is in flight. A flying northern harrier can be identified from nearly a mile away with good binoculars because the bird has a bright white patch on its rump. Some families of birds can be broken into even smaller groups based on one or two simple field marks. For example, warblers are fairly evenly divided between those that have wing bars and those that do not. So if you see a warbler-like bird, look quickly to see if it has wing bars. Sparrows, on the other hand, can be separated into two smaller groups based on whether or not the breast is streaked. Look for other broad distinctions for other families.
Behavior
A bird’s behavior – how it flies, forages, or generally comports itself – is one of the best clues to its identity. Hawks have a “serious” demeanor, crows and jays are “gregarious,” and cuckoos are… well, not really. Woodpeckers climb up the sides of tree trunks searching for grubs like a lineman scaling a telephone pole. Flycatchers, on the other hand, wouldn’t climb a tree trunk if their lives depended on it. They spend most of their time sitting upright on an exposed perch. When they see a bug cruising into range they quickly dart from their perch, snag the meal, and then return to the same perch or another one nearby. Finches spend a lot of their time on the ground in search of fallen seeds, as do mockingbirds, catbirds, and brown thrashers. Some wading birds, such as snowy egrets and reddish egrets, are very active foragers and chase their prey around in shallow waters. Other wading birds, such as great blue herons, are less impetuous and hunt slowly with great patience and stealth.
Even the way a bird props its tail gives some clues as to which species or family it might be. Wrens characteristically hold their tails in a cocked position and often bounce from side to side. Spotted sandpipers and Louisiana water thrushes bounce their tails and rumps rapidly up and down as if doing a stylish dance step. Some thrushes and flycatchers, on the other hand, move their tails frequently but slowly, with a wave-like motion.
You can even identify some birds just by the way that they fly. Most finches and woodpeckers move through the air with an undulating flight pattern, flapping their wings for short bursts and then tucking them under for a short rest. One group of raptors, the buteos or soaring hawks, circle the sky suspended on outstretched wings. Most falcons, another group of raptors, fly with strong wing beats and rarely hover. Yet another group, the accipiters or bird hawks, usually fly in a straight line with alternating periods of flapping and floating.
Habitat
Even if a range map shows that a bird occurs in your neck of the woods, this doesn’t mean the bird will be common wherever you go. Birds segregate themselves according to habitat type and are sometimes quite picky in selecting an area as home. Wading birds and ducks, for example, prefer watery habitats rather than dry upland areas. Pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches associate primarily with pinewoods and are less common in areas containing large numbers of oaks, hickories, and other deciduous trees. Beginning bird watchers must usually spend many hours in the field before they are able to associate different species with different habitat types. You should develop a key to habitats you frequent and keep notes of where you see different species. Make the habitat key simple at first, using terms like salt and freshwater marsh, pinelands, deciduous forest, beach, urban area, farm and pastureland, etc. Then elaborate on this key as you learn to distinguish among different habitat types.
You can put abbreviations such as “SM” (for salt water marsh), “PW” (for pinewoods), and “FP” (for farm and pasture) next to the pictures of birds in your field guide after you have some feel for where the birds occur. Most field guides actually provide this information in the written description but this abbreviated system may help you remember the habitats where each bird occurs.
Voice
Birds have unique songs and calls and voice is often all that’s needed to identify many of the birds you encounter. If each species didn’t have a distinctive call or song, there would be a lot of confusion out there when birds tried to communicate. Just as you can tell that the person on the other end of the phone is Uncle Bob and not Aunt Edith, so too can you learn to distinguish the different voices of birds. Listening to recordings helps considerably when you are trying to learn bird vocalizations. Many are currently available on tape and CD. You can also find them online. However, no matter how many recordings you listen to, there is no substitute for going out into the field. There’s something about the association of voice and bird that helps to fix both in memory. Plus, bird vocalizations are complex and no set of recordings can hope to encompass all the variety and geographic variations that can be experienced firsthand out in nature.
Keep all of these aspects in your notebook, recording the bird’s features as you watch it. Watch it as long as you can. Write down your description while it’s fresh. Then, look in your field guide for further identification. In general, you should try to keep the following points in mind when trying to identify the birds you see.
Begin by focusing on those groups that are both common and distinctive, and then, when you see an unknown species take a visual inventory of its unique characteristics. How large is it? What is the shape of the body? Does it walk, hop, waddle or wade? Notice the shape of its beak. Is it long, narrow, stalky, flat or hooked? Is there a crest on the head? Does the tail extend beyond the body? Is the tip round, square, forked or fan shaped?
Take a careful inventory of the colors of the bird. In particular look at the head, wings, and tail. In flight, the color of the rear edge of the wing, or speculum, is one of the key identifiers for waterfowl. When the bird moves, take note of its behavior. This is often as distinctive as its physical appearance. How does it hold its tail? Is it found on the ground, perched in trees, or soaring high above? When perched, does it hold its body upright or horizontal? Does it use its tail as a brace as in woodpeckers? If it climbs along the trunk, does it tend to climb up the tree or down?
If it lives in and around the water notice how it swims. Does it merely tip its bill into the water leaving its tail above the surface, or does it dive completely underwater? When it takes off, does it jump straight into the air or does it require a long runway to become airborne? If it wades, take note of how long its legs are. Does it slowly stalk like a heron or rapidly run along the shoreline probing with its beak? Does it bob up and down like a dipper or teeter like a spotted sandpiper?
When airborne, does it have a constant rhythm or does it undulate like a woodpecker? Does it generally fly in a straight line or perform aerial acrobatics like a swallow? How fast does it beat its wings? Is it alone or in a flock?
Also taking note of the habitat and season may help identify a bird, or at least help distinguish between two similar species. Birds are generally migratory, appearing in large flocks on open water in the fall and spring. Knowing their habitat and annual cycles can often form the last key element in identification.
If it was feeding, determine if its food was nectar, fruit, insects, seeds, or other creatures.
A few other things to consider when identifying birds:
• It’s what you notice first, but color is unreliable. A bird’s color changes dramatically in different light conditions. So don’t rely on color alone when you try to identify the bird in a guide.
• Check the range. You may think you’ve identified the bird, but make sure it should be there. Beginning birders make amazing finds–sometimes the only example of a species to be seen in that region. Your birding guide should give ranges for different species.
Make sure your bird belongs.
• Don’t try to locate a bird only by sound. They’re ventriloquists. And don’t scan the trees with your binoculars. Instead, watch for movement, and then aim your binoculars. Fast. Even if you’ve got one of those pesky, flitting warbler species, keep trying. You’ll get it.
• If you just can’t spot it, forget it. Remember this rule: Any bird you didn’t see was a robin. Don’t forget to pay special attention to the song of the bird. This could be a main component in identifying the bird you have seen.
Bird Watching For Beginners – Part Four
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Bird Watching,
nature
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