Sometimes the Best answer is “I don’t know”
There were many, many mistakes with my name attached when I was a new birder. I still make mistakes today, and some of them continue to be ludicrously silly ones, such as my recent attempt to ID a juvenile turkey vulture as a black vulture. I have always had a tendency to let that thrill of “REALLY SPECIAL BIRD” lead me through the decision tree to a species I’ll later have to retract. I’ve gotten better at this over the years, but I’m far from immune to the call of the rarity.
You can never be perfect in your bird ID work, and we all are going to make mistakes. The trick for me is to try to learn from mistakes, and when I can, teach them as well. The answer is not “Whoops! I’ll try harder next time”, but I to sit down and go over what I did to find the ID and where that went astray. I often spend more time in the field guides understanding what I missed than the time I spent on the original decision.
I can’t say how much I’ve learned thanks to the birders who have mentored me in patiently (sometimes with a giggle) nudging me through my mistake and encouraging me to figure out where I went off the trail. As I’ve been saying, getting good at bird ID is really about the time and practice and study and repetition, which makes it just like any other learned skill you might take up, like playing guitar or piano. Birding is ultimately about having a good time and you should only invest the time that makes that activity more fun for you — and while I love the challenge of chasing a challenging ID, that chase is only fun to a point. After that, it’s work.
As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, one of the best pieces of advice I was given was that it was important to know when to say “I don’t know”. I hate saying those words, but to be honest, teaching myself to step back and admit it was one of the biggest improvements to my birding as I matured as a birder.
I Don’t Know is a perfectly acceptable answer. You find the challenge of IDing birds to be fun — and you hate not answering the question. It can be frustrating, but in reality, it’s going to happen a lot, because you often just don’t get a good enough look at a bird in detail to be able to figure it out. My bird ID skills took a major step forward quickly once I started accepting that “I don’t know” wasn’t a failure. It’s not a mistake, it’s a lack of having enough information. This is especially important when you are making reports to eBird or to a group like SBB, because making a bad call can cause other birders to go out and try to confirm it, and if it’s wrong — you’ve wasted their time.
By learning to allow myself to not know, or not be sure about an ID, that doesn’t imply that you don’t report it or talk about it. What I do — again, look at the Black Vulture piece above — is try to make it clear what I’m thinking and how confident I am. With that not-a-Black-Vulture, I posed it as a question of ID because I thought it might be but at the same time I was pretty sure my best guess was wrong, which turned out to be correct. But since it was posed as an “I need help here” instead of a “hey, lookee what I found!”, I set the expectations of other birders to prevent them from possibly going chasing a bird until we got a better grip on what it really was — which, it turned out, was a baby Turkey Vulture. Not the thing I want to send a birder on a 30 minute drive chase for.
Examples in weird Bird IDs
Let’s take a look at this bird that I found at Hellyer County Park while chasing some Snow and Ross’s geese that wintered there one year. They are rare in Santa Clara County, even though they are common in the Central Valley region a couple of hours inland.
A good rule of thumb is to ignore the concept of a bird being a hybrid until all other possibilities are ruled out. So is this a Ross’s Goose? Or a Hybrid? To me, this looks like a Ross’s x Snow Goose hybrid, and for what it’s worth, many other birders at the time did so, also — and yet, since we didn’t get any material for genetic testing, the ultimate answer will always be unknown.
The two key determiners for the species tend to be size: Ross’s is smaller than Snow, but of course, have fun determining that if the two aren’t standing next to each other. The other is the Ross’s beak. It is smaller and not as pronounced as the Snow goose, plus it’s missing the trademark Snow Goose “smile”, but again, there’s a warning there, in that the Snow Goose “smile” can vary across individuals and sometimes be very minimal.
The head and body shape both remind me of Ross’s goose, while the beak — seems larger than a Ross’s should have, but is far from what you’ll see on a Snow. I’d call it — intermediate — between the two. Toss in the somewhat anomalous scattered black on the head and around the chest, where you’d expect pure white, and that kind of deviation from form tends to make me consider hybrid — although if this is a first year bird, maybe no as much.
Here are pictures of both Ross’s and Snow geese to do your own comparisons.
Is it a hybrid? Maybe. Possible. I think so. But Definitely? Definitely not Definitely. But I think it makes for an interesting discussion….
And as I like to point out to birders when we say “ID IS HARD” — if it was easy, we’d all have gotten bored and would be off doing something else.
Good luck on your next chase!
