The first pine warbler and eastern phoebe showed up in my yard over a week early this year. Birds are already migrating into Maine for the summer. I guess it’s time to review my advice on how best to identify them.
First, don’t blindly trust books, apps or yourself. Books mislead, apps misidentify and people make mistakes. Forgive them all, especially yourself. Making mistakes is often the best way to learn. At least, that’s how I learned and continue to learn. Nobody is right every time.
Guidebooks are good, but sometimes they are too good. Every bird gets its own page, creating the impression that they’re all equally possible. They’re not. In any given location, a species can be abundant, common, uncommon, occasional, rare or virtually impossible. When using a guidebook to identify a bird, it’s helpful to know which birds are most likely to be seen in a particular location.
Each bird gets its own picture in the book, and every picture is the same size on each page. But size is often the first thing you notice about a real bird, and the hardest thing to judge when you’re looking at pictures.
Books also describe every bird perfectly, with each field mark showing well. That’s exactly the way we don’t see them in real life. A bird can have many field marks that aid identification, but often just two or three that matter.
The easiest to see include throat color, breast streaks and wing bars. The eyes may have rings around them, lines through them or eyebrows over them. Look for these features. Remember what you see. Only then, look in the book and compare.
Apps can be useful. Merlin Bird ID is arguably the most widely used. It’s a free download from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, empowering smartphones to identify birds by sight and sound.
But it also makes mistakes. Well, that’s not fair. More precisely, it’s only as good as its existing database of images and sound clips. As more is added, Merlin gets more reliable. Treat every Merlin identification as a best guess.
Furthermore, birds offer humans many more clues than just sight and sound. Birders gain context from habitats and behaviors that Merlin can’t see, leading Merlin to false conclusions.
What is the fastest way to identify a bird from a long list of suspects? Shorten the short list. You may not know what the bird is, but you often know what it isn’t. Take those off your list.
Any bird that isn’t the right size and shape comes off the list. Any bird that displays the wrong field marks comes off the list.
Birds that aren’t in your region come off the list. Two years ago, I was in Arizona, looking for birds I had never seen before. I didn’t know what some of the western birds were, but I knew they weren’t eastern birds. All eastern-only birds came off my list.
Likewise, habitats refine the list. Field birds are in fields. Forest birds are in forests. You’ll never see a loon in a tree.
Shrinking the list is especially important with big groups of small birds. Warblers confound beginners and confuse experienced birders. The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America describes 49 warblers. That’s a big list.
It’s also a shrinkable list. Take out the ones that are not found locally. For Maine, that’s half the warblers on Sibley’s list. Take out the ones that don’t match the field marks you see. That will eliminate another half. Be careful with color. There can be a lot of color variation between sexes and ages of the same species. It’s not long before the list of 49 warblers shrinks to a half dozen viable candidates.
The best way to make bird identification easier is to not make it harder. Just start with what’s around home. Then branch out to other places you frequent. As your skills improve, continue on to other habitats. Doing a little at a time keeps you from becoming overwhelmed and discouraged.
Bird identification skills develop from about 20% study and 80% practice. Just do it. Make as many mistakes as you can. Go out with others and make mistakes. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Everybody makes mistakes.
Frankly, these are things I wish I knew when I was younger. And I wish I was younger.
