Learning to See the Details
One of the challenges to a newer birder is knowing what to look for that will help you with the ID, and learning how to see those details. This takes time and practice, like mastering any set of skills does. Also, birds often refuse to cooperate and stand still for you to carefully study them. When you see a bird, you need to try to take in as much detail about it as you can in the time the bird allows you — or if you have a camera and can get it aimed and in focus in time, grab some shots, even “lousy” ones, that can help you recall detail later.
Here is one of those shots, taken during an outing one fall when I was searching for some previously reported Vireos. At first glance this might seem like a useless shot, but it immediately let me know it wasn’t a Vireo, and I was able to fairly quickly determine what species it actually was.
Why isn’t it a vireo? Vireo’s have black/dark legs, and those feet are definitely not black. Noticing a detail like that can help you rule out many species quickly in your attempt to simply the ID challenge of a bird.
But what is it? Here are some details to ponder: those seem like long legs compared to body size, and they are dark near the bird and end up pinkish in the feet. There’s only one area bird that has those kind of feet, although that was something I used to confirm the ID, not find it. There are black wingbars visible, which also limits which species this could be. Finally, and what caught my attention, is this: if you look at the top of the head on the left-hand side, you can see a teeny-tiny dot of red.
This is, in other words, a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet.
These kinds of details matter, and you learn to see them only through time and practice. I, to be honest, am much better seeing them at home in a photograph than in the field trying desperately to get a good look at a bird desperately trying to fly away from me the intruder, but when you are out and about, understanding what details can help you narrow the challenge of making the ID is a skill well learned.
And with my camera, even if I don’t get a shot I’ll ever use in my portfolio, these weird “failed” shots are quite helpful in going back for later study to try to get an ID on one that got away, or confirm an ID you aren’t sure about. But what’s a big part of this is spending time, whether in the field studying birds or at home studying species in the field guide, to help you learn what to see and how to interpret it.
For me, some common winter birds I’ve spent a lot of time on in this way are the Zonotrichia sparrows: White-Crowned and Golden-Crowned. It is very easy to confuse the two when seeing immature species, and it wasn’t until a couple of years ago I started feeling comfortable identifying younger birds in the winter flocks around here. And the way I did it was sitting down and watching them, and comparing birds to field guides. Some people come to these comparisons more naturally — I have to work at them, and it’s a real joy when I realize I’m starting to “see” an ID in the field rather than studying a bird and trying to figure the ID out. I’ve had the same struggle with swallows, which complicate it by flying really fast in random chaotic patterns, making them a real challenge to get good looks at the details — but after five years of on and off study, I finally feel like I can reliably ID most of the swallows in a flock around here. If a random rare swallow shows up, I’m likely to miss it, but for the common species, I feel pretty good now. But it took hours of watching (and cussing) and going back and comparing what I remembered seeing to what I see in field guides to start putting this all together. Totally worth it, though, to have finally graduated from “that’s a barn swallow and god, I have no clue about the rest”.
I can’t offer magic solutions here, it’s an aspect of birding that I think you simply need to put in time and practice and study; but when you do, it can be quite rewarding because it’ll reduce the frustration of knowing you saw interesting birds but having no way to figure out what birds they were. And it’s all about learning to see details, and knowing how to interpret them when you do.
One thing I can tell you is that the more you do this and study the birds you see, the more detail you will start seeing and recalling later when considering what species of bird you’re studying. Some people are really adept at this, and others (myself included) improve slowly over time — but we do improve.
