Principles of Bird Identification

Good morning Three Sisters students and welcome to another Amazing Bird Race blog post. When I see a bird there are seven things that I use to determine what it is.

Size

Shape

Call or song

What's known as field marks

Behavior

Habitat

Range, where it normally lives in the world

Size is pretty self explanatory but it can be difficult to judge size if you are looking at a single bird.

Shape is probably one of the first things you use to determine the species of bird. As soon as you see a bird you get the sense of its shape. There are experienced birders that only need shape to differentiate many bird species.

Often, a bird is heard well before it is seen. Experienced birders know the individual bird songs and in many instances, this is the only way you can be sure of the ID Some species look so much alike, you need to hear their call or song to tell them apart.

Field marks are what most people think of first when they want to try to identify a bird. Such things as color, markings, the size and shape of the bill, and wing projection are some of the main field marks used to tell one species from another

How a bird behaves can go a long way to separating one bird from another. I count how they fly as a behavior and sometimes that is all you need to see to at least determine what family it is in. If it is hovering around your face checking out your red shirt, it is probably a hummingbird.

Some birds are very specific to what type of habitat they occupy and others will fly around in different habitats but during breeding season, all birds are usually found in their preferred habitat.

Some birds can be found all over the world but most birds have specific areas of the globe that they prefer and knowing the range of the bird helps eliminate some species from the list of possibilities. You always have to be aware however that they do have wings, and sometimes birds stray far from their normal range.

By now, I trust you have studied the bird of the week. Congratulations on the correct ID.  In North America there are two small woodpeckers that occupy the same range which is most of the continent, and they present a bit of an ID challenge. The Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers. They are the same color, black and white with the males having a red spot on the top back side of the the head. They are pretty close in size, the Downy being slightly smaller. They occupy the same habitat and forage for food in the same way.

The first field mark and in fact the best field mark to tell the difference between Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers is bill size. The smaller Downy has a much smaller and shorter bill compared to the longer thicker bill of the Hairy. After you see a few of them it becomes easy to see the difference. I happen to have a video of a Hairy Woodpecker that I shot earlier this summer and if you compare this with the Bird of the Week video, I think you will see the difference in bill size easily. One other field mark to look for with these two birds is the edge of the tail. It's not always visible but there are two black dots on the edge of the white on the Downy's tail that are absent on the Hairy. The bird of the week video shows these black dots well.

Downy Woodpecker

Hairy Woodpecker

Here is a video of a Hairy Woodpecker that I took earlier this summer at Jacks Creek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEa9Pe3REoI

In subsequent posts we will discuss in greater detail some of these identification tools. So, I am off to find the bird of the week for next week.