Birding Basics: Learning how to use your field guide effectively

OK, birdboi, since you asked, I'm starting a post with tips on learning how to use your field guide effectively. I don't expect to finish it in one day, but you can keep coming back here to see more each time I add to it.

Tip #1: Spend time with your field guide at home

With over 800 species of birds to be found in North America and somewhere between 400 and 500-odd pages in a complete field guide to North American Birds, finding the unfamiliar bird just seen in a field guide can be a daunting task for the beginner. This task can be made easier by spending some time with your field guide at home, when you're not looking for a particular bird. Here follow some good ways to spend that time.

Tip # 2: Read the front matter

Too often people skip over the text at the front of a field guide and go straight to the birds, but there is helpful information to be found in the front. Take the time to read it. Oftentimes there are tips for using that particular field guide in the front matter. There will be illustrations of the parts of one or more types of bird that include the names for those parts. Study these illustrations of the parts of a bird and try to learn the names and locations of those parts. At the very least, know that the illustrations are there and where to find them when you want them. Often some of those names of bird parts are mentioned in the text about a particular bird, or next to the illustrations of a bird, so you'll want to know, or be able to find out, what the terms mean.

Tip #3: Learn how the birds are organized in the field guide

This is the most important thing you can do to limit the number of pages you have to look at when you're hunting for an unfamiliar bird in your field guide. Most field guides place the birds in taxonomic order, or something close to it. This is the most difficult organization to master, so it warrants some discussion.

What is taxonomy? Taxonomy is the science of classifying living things according to similarities of structure, origin, etc., and the practice of assigning unique Latin names to all those classifications. If memory serves, birdboi, I first learned about taxonomy in a 10th grade biology class, so you may not have learned about it yet. Here's a page that gives you some basic information about the taxonomy of birds that you will need to read in order to understand what comes next, when I use the terms order, family, genus and species.
http://www.earthlife.net/birds/taxonomy.html

Although it isn't intuitively obvious if the names of the orders and families aren't included, the birds in a taxonomically ordered field guide are grouped for the most part by their orders, within the orders by their families, and within the families by their genus. Here is a page with links to pages that give the orders and families according to one classification, which unfortunately isn't quite the same classification that the AOU uses and which most North American field guides are based on. What I want you to notice here is that one table lists the non-passerines and the other table lists the passerines.

http://www.earthlife.net/birds/classification.html 

Passeriformes (the passerines) is the largest order of birds. Over 50% of the birds in the world fall into the order Passeriformes. All the North American songbirds fall into the order Passeriformes. How does it help you to know this?

Well, in your Sibley's, birdboi, as well as in any other field guide that's organized in taxonomic order, the non-passerines are in the front and run all the way through the woodpeckers. The passerines start with the tyrant flycatchers and run all the way to the end. If you find the page where the tyrant flycatchers start, right after the woodpeckers, you'll notice that the passerines occupy just about the last 40% of the book, while the non-passerines occupy just about the first 60%. You might want to put a tab on that page to mark that division. Now, if you see a little songbird in one of your trees or bushes, or hopping around on the ground, you only have to look in the back part of the book for it, because it won't be in the front part of the book. Isn't that helpful?

What is in the front 60% of the book? Well, all the water birds are there, but they're not all together. The water birds start with loons and run all the way through the end of the ducks. Then there are the diurnal (active during the day) raptors like hawks and eagles, and the upland game birds like grouse and pheasants and quail. The rest of the water birds come after that. Then you get birds like doves, parrots, cuckoos, owls, goatsuckers and swifts, hummingbirds, trogons, kingfishers, and finally the woodpeckers.

If you ever use a checklist to check off the birds you see while you're on a field trip, you'll see that the birds on the checklist are also listed in taxonomic order, so it can be very helpful to get a general idea of what the taxonomic order for birds is, both for using your field guide and for using a checklist.

An excellent exercise that will help you do this is to go through your field guide and make a list of the categories of birds in the order they appear. Such a list would start off like this:

Loons
Grebes

Notice that in the Sibley book, there is a black bar above the category name to help you find the beginning of each of the major categories.

You could make this list just by looking at the Table of Contents in your Sibleys, but if you do it by going through the book, you'll get a chance to look at the illustrations while you're doing it, so you can see what the birds in each category look like. Ultimately, doing it that way will help you begin to develop the ability to place an unfamiliar bird you see into the correct category, so you will be able to go straight to the pages of birds in that category when you're trying to find out what it is.

By the way, the order in which birds are listed in the AOU classification system is somewhat different from the order in the linked page above. Sibley has rearranged that order to some extent in presenting the birds in his book, so that he can show you birds that look fairly similar in pages that are close together. He tells you this in the front matter under the heading Classification. Other taxonomically arranged field guides do the same thing. It makes them easier to use.

The AOU classification system can be found on the page linked below, if you slide down far enough. It includes a lot more birds than are found in your field guide, however, because it includes a much larger geographic area. As you slide down, you'll get to an alphabetic list of the orders (note that those names all end in formes). After that, you'll find a list of the orders and families in true taxonomic order. All the family names end in ae. When you see the word Pelicaniformes as the beginning of one of Sibley's categories, you can tell that this word is the name of an order of birds. What isn't quite so obvious is that the word Alcids is the name of a family, which looks like Alcidae in Latin. Ae is one of several plural word endings in Latin, and it's quite common for people to change the ae to s, to make the word look more like an English word. If you click on any of the families, you'll get a list of the birds in that family, with both their Latin genus and species names and their English names.

Notice that the AOU changes a few things in its taxonomy or in the English names it assigns to birds nearly every year, so our field guides become a little out of date as the years go by.

AOU checklist: http://www.aou.org/checklist/index.php3#tina


Tip #4: Study the characteristics of the different families of birds

Knowing which "half" of the book to look in is a help, but you want to be able to limit your search for an unfamiliar bird even more than that. Start with the passerine half if that's the sort of bird you usually see. Look at the sparrows, for instance. What characteristics do they have in common that cause them to be in a group of their own? Notice their short fat bills, for instance. What other birds have short, fat bills? You'll find that the birds with short fat bills are in the latter half of the passerine section, so if you see a bird with a bill like that, it will be in that end of the book.

Now look at the warblers. What kind of bills do they have? They aren't anything like the shape of sparrows' bills, are they? The birds with thinner bills are mostly in the front part of the passerine section.

Look at the vireos. How do their bills differ from the warblers? How do they differ from the warblers in other respects? If you saw a small bird that might be either a warbler or a vireo, what would you have to look for on the bird to decide which family it was in?

You want to train your mind to look for the sorts of characteristics that distinguish birds in one family from birds in other families. Those characteristics are not limited to color. The length and shape of the bill is important. The length of the tail relative to the body size is important. The length of the wings is important -- do they extend beyond the beginning of the tail? If so, how far? Maybe they extend beyond the end of the tail! The overall shape of the bird is important -- is it a long, sleek looking bird, or a short fat bird? Look at the color of the eyes and legs, as well as the color of the bills -- these can be useful ID clues. Look at the sizes given in inches -- which are the larger birds and which are the smaller birds? The illustrations don't show the relative sizes, so you have to look at the numbers.

Which birds have any red on them? Any blue? Any yellow? Any green? Which birds are mostly brown, or mostly gray, or black? Which birds have streaky breasts? Which birds don't? Which birds have wing bars and which ones don't? How many wing bars?

How do the juveniles of each group differ from the adults? Could you confuse a juvenile something with an adult of another group on the basis of its colors? If so, what other characteristics would you have to look for to decide which group the bird falls into?

In the non-passerines section, what makes a gull look different from a tern? In the hawks, what makes an accipiter look different from a buteo? What makes a duck look different from a loon or a grebe? What makes an owl look different from a hawk or a nightjar? You can find lots of questions to ask yourself and try to answer there.

The more time you spend looking at the illustrations in your field guide, asking yourself questions like this and trying to answer them, the better you will get at IDing birds. You will not only become more familiar with where the birds are in your field guide, you will become more familiar with the types of birds there are and what to look for on them to help you identify them. Training yourself to look at a bird critically is very important in learning how to identify birds, and you can do a lot of this kind of work at home, just by looking at your field guide and finding the answers to questions that you ask yourself.

First try to learn the different categories of birds. Then try to learn the differences between similar categories. How would you tell if a bird was a sparrow or a finch, for example? When you've got that sort of thing down pretty well, you can start asking yourself things like what makes the various sparrows different from each other. There the facial patterns and wing bars will become very important, as well as relative sizes, tail lengths, leg colors, etc. In these larger families of birds, you will want to start looking at the genus names and ask yourself things like what makes the Spizella sparrows look different from the Ammodramus sparrows The birds in one genus will have some similarities to each other -- that's why they're in the same genus. It will take you awhile before you get to that point, though.

Tip #5: Look at the range maps. Use the range maps!

Every field guide has a key to the colors used in its range maps. Know where to find that key. Pay attention to the seasons that a bird might be where you are, or if it's likely to be where you are at all. In the exercises you do above, concentrate on the birds that you are likely to see first. When you are trying to ID a bird you've seen and you find several birds in your field guide that look fairly similar to it and to each other, the range maps will tell you which one or ones it's more likely to be. Birds do appear outside of their normal ranges at times, but where the distinctions between birds are rather subtle, you have to get pretty good at IDing before you can tell for sure that you are seeing a bird that is outside of its normal range.

Tip # 6: Read the text on the bird pages

There is usually some text at the beginning of each family section. Read it -- it usually tells you things that are helpful. In the Sibley guide there is text at the top of the page, at the bottom of the page, under the illustrations of each species, and next to the illustrations. Read that text -- it tells you things you need to know. If you ignore it, you won't find out which birds look so much alike that they can only be told apart from each other by their songs, for example! The text may also tell you things about the habitat a bird is likely to be found in, whether it's usually found on the ground or somewhere else, whether it walks or hops, how it flies, and the sounds it makes. These things can be important clues when you're trying to ID a bird. There's no substitute for actually hearing a recording of the sounds, though, and you can find at least some of the sounds most birds make on their pages on the Cornell site, here:

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/programs/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/

Tip #7: Pay attention to the lines and symbols next to the illustrations

The symbol for a male bird is a little circle with an arrow going up and to the right. It's supposed to make you think of a hunter who hunts with a bow and arrow, who would most likely be a man. The symbol for a female bird is a little circle with a cross at the bottom. It's supposed to represent a mirror and comb, which are things that a woman would be more likely to use. That should help you remember which one is which. If you don't see those symbols for a particular bird, that means the males and females look alike.

Most field guides have lines pointing to certain parts of the birds. Those lines are calling your attention to field marks (things you can see when you're looking at a bird outdoors if you see it at the right angle and if it's close enough to see them) that are important for distinguishing that bird from another bird that looks similar to it. You want to look at those field marks and compare that part of the bird with other birds that are like it.

Tip #8: Learn to spell the names of the birds correctly

If you're looking for more information on a bird by doing a Google search, or looking for images of a bird by doing an image search, you may not find anything at all, or you may find the wrong information, if you don't spell the name in the search box correctly. (Jacko wrote "Who cares about spelling?" in another post, but this is one good reason to care about spelling!) If there is a hyphen in the name, as in Night-heron, use it. Otherwise you'll get links to information about (or photos of) regular herons instead of night-herons. Also, when you want to use the index at the back of the book to find the page a particular bird is on, you'll have trouble finding it if you can't spell it corrrectly. (Night-herons, for example, are indexed under the word Night-herons, not under Herons, so those hyphens can really be important!)

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Well, birdboi, that's all I can think of at the moment. I think I'm done with this set of tips now. If I think of anything else I'll add it, but you could print it out now if you want to, or maybe wait a couple of days just in case I think of something else . Maybe somebody else will suggest something I've left out and I can add it.

Field guides are the basic tool for identifying birds. There are many types of information in a field guide and most people, whether beginning or intermediate, use only a portion of them. Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your field guide and better identify the birds you see.

1. Look at the range map

2. Look closely at the picture

3. Read the identification clues

4. Check the habitat

5. Check the sounds

6. Read your field guide at night

Tip#9: When you go out into the field, leave the field guide at home. Take instead, a notebook and mechanical pencil (multiple leads, no sharpening required). When you spot a bird, write down everything you see including habitat, behavior and sounds. Later, with the field guide, compare your notes with the most likely candidates. Much better than trying to pick one bird out of a line-up of several hundred. Following the first 8 steps will prepare you for this and your observation skills will be honed to a fine edge.

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