Outdoors
The BDN outdoors section brings readers into the woods, waters and wild places of Maine. It features stories on hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation and recreation, told by people who live these experiences. This section emphasizes hands-on knowledge, field reports, issues, trends and the traditions that define life outside in Maine. Read more Outdoors stories here.
It’s here. This is the time when the majority of migrating birds flood back into Maine. For anyone relatively new to birding, it can be overwhelming. You’ll hear many birds singing all at once as they rush to establish territories and attract mates. Even for experienced birders, migration season introduces several weeks of chaos.
Enjoy it.
About this time every year, I offer counsel on how to make bird identification easier. Usually, the first step is to simplify the range of choices in front of you. The standard police lineup features six people from which the eyewitness is supposed to pick out the suspect. Imagine if that lineup consisted of 100 people.
To reduce the overwhelming range of identification possibilities, birds can be divided mentally into smaller, more manageable groups. You can first divide them into two piles: birds you know and birds you don’t know. Then they can be divided by size, shape, color and field marks. Birds can be divided by habitat and behavior. It doesn’t take long before the bird lineup is suitably reduced to six or fewer.
Simplification is the key. That’s my usual advice.
But not today.
Today, I recommend getting overwhelmed.
Get out there and let the sound wash over you. Listen to how many different songs there are without identifying a single one of them. Find a grove that has multiple species flitting around the treetops.
Get confused. Make mistakes. Appreciate the multitude of birds that wintered in the tropics, then fought their way back to raise families in their favorite state. In eastern Maine, it’s possible to find 130 species in one day. Up to 160 can be found in southern Maine, since some birds think York and Cumberland counties are plenty far enough.
If you’re a beginning birder, cherish every moment of it. It doesn’t last. Eventually, identification skills improve whether you like it or not. There’s an old adage that goes something like this: Never get too good at something, because it gets boring once you know it all.
I know my way around the birds of Maine pretty well. But put me somewhere unfamiliar and I slide right back down the learning curve.
I just returned from a birding trip through southern Texas. It was exhilarating to see and hear birds I couldn’t identify immediately. The feeling of discovery and surprise was delicious.
Maine has just one kingbird: the eastern kingbird. Texas has six of these tyrant flycatchers. Two of them — Couch’s and tropical kingbirds — are practically identical and best separated by voice. I failed regularly to identify these birds correctly.
It felt great.
An adventure can’t be too comfortable and predictable or it’s not an adventure. Routine is the enemy of excitement.
So, for intermediate birders, throw yourself into trouble. Walk a trail and celebrate not only the birds you can identify, but the ones you can’t. If you get them all right, keep walking until you get one wrong.
Explore a different habitat where birds are adept at concealing themselves. Marshes and fields are particularly good places for skulky birds to hide.
It’s natural to strive for perfection. Instead, try to make bird identification messy again. If an ID proves incorrect, ask yourself: What went wrong? Did I miss a field mark? View it from a bad angle? Did it resemble a similar species?
Light conditions can play funny tricks. Shadows make parts of a bird look darker than they are. Backlighting can obscure colors completely. It’s weird how a bird high in the sky sometimes looks bigger than its real size against a cloudy backdrop.
Argue with yourself. Argue with friends. Argue with Merlin, the bird identification app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Everyone makes mistakes, especially Merlin.
Poor Merlin. It does a good job identifying birds by sound, but throw it into a bunch of northern mockingbirds that are all mimicking other birds and it struggles mightily. It’s only human. However, Merlin doesn’t get embarrassed. It just goes on to misidentify the next bird without a second thought.
Pete Dunne is one of my favorite birding authors. In 2003, he wrote these words I live by: “The difference between a beginning birder and an experienced one is that beginning birders have misidentified few birds. Experienced birders have misidentified thousands.”
The fun of birding is not about identifying birds. It’s about trying to identify birds. That’s true for everyone from beginner to expert.
