1. AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO FIELD IDENTIFICATION OF BIRDS In the two decades since the first edition of Advanced Birding was published, the amount of information available has increased by staggering amounts. In the late 1980s, a serious birder's reference library on ID would have included Gulls: A Guide to Identification by P. J. Grant, Shorebirds: An Identification Guide by Peter Hayman et al., and a handful of detailed articles from British and American birding magazines. Today there are multiple fine books specifically treating the identification of gulls, shorebirds,hawks, hummingbirds, and any other group you can think of, and so many fine articles have been published that it is impossible to keep track of them all. In the late 1980s, Peter Pyle had just produced a first slim guide to the molts and plumages of songbirds. Today that guide has been superseded by two fat volumes by Pyle, totalling over 1,500 pages, detailing molt, plumage sequences, and geographic variation of every North American bird. In the late 1980s an expert birder asked me, in all seriousness, whether the Pomarine Jaeger even has a distinct plumage as a juvenile. Today it takes a few clicks on the Internet to find dozens of photos of this plumage, and many of these actually are identified correctly! What had been a trickle of published material has become a torrent. While the challenge formerly had been to find basic information on identifying most birds, the challenge now is to sift through the blizzards of information to find those points that are relevant, significant, and reliable. As times change, reference books and field guides must change also. The first edition of Advanced Birding included detailed chapters on identification of 34 species pairs or groups, providing information that was not readily available to most birders. Simply updating that book now without changing its focus would hardly serve a useful purpose, because virtually all birders have access to vastly more information today than they did in 1990. If I were to simply list more and more field marks for more species, this guide would take on the dimensions of an encyclopedia before it added materially to what is already available. So in this edition I have taken a different approach altogether, and the focus here is on how to identify birds, or how to learn to identify birds. In other words, it's not about memorizing field marks, it's about truly understanding what you see and hear. Most of this book, then, consists of a thorough exploration of how to look at birds and how to listen to them, how to come to grips with the special challenges of each group of birds. Unlike many field guides, this one is not designed for quick reference in the field. The best time to study it is before going out to look at birds. The first seven chapters will help orient you to universal aspects of bird recognition. Then, if you're heading to the tidal flats or the sewage ponds, read the chapter on learning to identify shorebirds. If you're heading to a hawkwatch site, read the chapter on learning to identify birds of prey. And so on. In addition to all these introductory chapters, I have included ten "sample" chapters treating specific groups in depth. These should be useful in their own right, but they also illustrate various principles: the challenges involved in identifying jaegers, for example, are very different from those we encounter with Empidonax flycatchers. As you master the identification of more groups of birds, you will develop the kind of background knowledge that makes it easier to learn even more. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: IMPRESSIONS VS. FEATHER-EDGES Since the 1980s, the birding world has put a lot of discussion into two distinct approaches to identification. One involves what is often called "giss" (for "general impressions of size and shape"), or "birding by impression." The other involves a careful study of fine details, down to the pattern of individual feathers (this may be referred to, sometimes with a hint of sarcasm, as the "feather-edges" approach). Both of these styles seem to be at least partly a reaction against the system of simplistic field marks. Under that system, everything was reduced to simple on-off characters: the bird has wing bars or doesn't, it has streaks below or doesn't, and so on. That approach, ignoring both the obvious aspects of shape and the subtle nuances of fine detail, led to a lot of superficial identifications and a lot of potential for error. Simple field marks hold many traps and pitfalls for the unwary. Both of these other approaches, impressions and feather-edges, have their drawbacks and their strengths, and a serious birder will work on developing both. Identifying birds by impression has been called "the new Cape May school of birding," which would be a surprise to the experts who were practicing this approach in California in the 1960s or in Massachusetts in the 1940s. Still, this style of ID has been raised to a higher level and well publicized by several experts associated with Cape May, New Jersey, especially Pete Dunne, Michael O'Brien, and Kevin Karlson. Most people, even if they have not considered it, are already subconsciously capable of using this approach. We may use it frequently in other contexts. If we know a person well, we may recognize her from half a mile away by subtle clues of posture or the way she walks. Likewise, if we know a bird well, we may recognize it at a great distance by almost subliminal hints of its shape and actions. An experienced birder seeing a speck soaring slowly over a faraway ridge might identify it as a Turkey Vulture without being able to discern a single detail. An experienced birder seeing a flock of birds wheeling tightly in the air over a distant mudflat might identify the birds as Dunlins, even without being able to see anything of color or markings. In these cases, factors of place, season, habitat, and probability are added to clues provided by shape and actions to create an identification that seems almost intuitive but in fact is based on real evidence. Identifying birds by looking at fine detail is an approach that goes back even further -- to the days when most birds were identified in the hand. Until the latter part of the 20th century, of course, such fine points usually couldn't be seen in the field, but optics today are so good that we often can see details of individual feathers -- either in the field, or in digital photos later. This has allowed birders to rediscover some of the same technical details that were familiar to museum ornithologists a century ago and to employ in the field some of the same fine points that are used by banders examining birds in the hand. This kind of detailed study opens up many avenues for identifying the age and sex and subspecies of a bird, not just its species, in ways that simply would not be possible in birding by general impression. Both of these approaches -- impressions and fine details -- have their advantages and drawbacks. An experienced birder may identify many birds by quick impression and may be highly accurate with this approach, but occasional birds give very misleading first impressions. As described on pp. 32 - 40 under Common Pitfalls of Field Identification, individual birds can be aberrant in small ways that utterly change their superficial appearance. External factors such as lighting can also change the way a bird looks, and weather can have a major impact -- for example, birds fly differently and even perch in different postures in strong winds. For reasons like these, our first impression of a bird may be seriously off base. If we merely mistake one common species for another one that would be equally common, there's no harm done. But any time we identify a rare bird by general impressions, we need to follow up by checking on more specific points. It might seem that the other approach -- the close-up, detailed approach -- would be less prone to error, but there is such a thing as looking at the feathers and missing the bird. British humorist Bill Oddie once pointed out that a detailed description of a Sky Lark could be passed off as a detailed description of a Pectoral Sandpiper, so long as it didn't say too much about the bird's size or shape! In actual practice this kind of thing doesn't happen too often, but there have been a number of cases in which birders got rather far along in identifying an odd bird to age or subspecies even though they had the species (or even the family) wrong. So any detailed study of feather-edges might be on more solid ground if birders were to start by stepping back and looking at the whole bird and its relation to its surroundings. These two approaches might be compared to two methods of learning to read. Popular at one time was the "look-say" method, in which children were taught to recognize the appearance of whole words, with less attention to individual letters. The early results of this were impressive, with two-year-olds proudly recognizing and pronouncing words such as "cat" and "horse." However, this approach left the young readers ill-equipped to figure out words that they didn't recognize. At the other extreme, the phonics method focused on the sounds of individual letters (as confusing as those may be in written English), teaching children to sound out letters, syllables, and words. This approach was slower at the start but it was shown to produce readers who ultimately would know more words. In practice, of course, once we learn to read, we readily recognize whole words. We see a word like "incredible" and we don't have to sound out the letters or stop to think whether the "c" is hard or soft; the word registers in a flash and we're on to the next word. Only when we hit an unfamiliar word does our grasp of phonics come into play, as we pause to try to pronounce the word and consider what it means. Similarly, our first identification of a bird may involve careful consideration of details, but once we know it well we may name it at a glance by impressions alone. Only when we see an odd individual or unfamiliar species, or see a bird under misleading conditions, or want to determine more than just the species involved, might we go back to the careful analysis of fine details. This book will focus mainly on details and concrete field marks, because that is the necessary approach for someone dealing with a new or unfamiliar bird. I could go on for pages describing the flight behavior of a Pomarine Jaeger, for example, but until you have seen that bird for yourself and watched it flying, such a description would be almost meaningless. Once you have spent a lot of time watching Pomarine Jaegers, you may be able to name them instantly by their bulky shape, broad inner part of the wing, powerful wingbeats, etc., but first you have to see those things on birds of known identity, and to know their identity you have to see the kinds of details that this book describes and illustrates. I know that some beginners are tempted to try to recognize birds by impressions right off the bat. It is tempting to take this shortcut, to bypass the details and go straight to an instinctive mastery of the bird. But how does this work in real life? Suppose an eager new birder sees a distant hawk flying, decides that its wingbeats look only moderate in speed, and calls it a Cooper's Hawk. The next distant hawk seems to have faster wingbeats, so he calls it a Sharp-shinned Hawk. If the first bird was actually a Red-shouldered Hawk and the second was a Cooper's, our birder has started to build a mental reference library that is flawed from the outset. Of course there's nothing wrong with watching the actions of distant unknown hawks, but we shouldn't use our impressions of them as a basis for comparison. That should be reserved for birds that we have definitely identified by specific details. Therefore, this book's focus on detail is not meant to deny the importance of impressions; it merely acknowledges that details can be learned from a book while impressions must be learned through actual experience. To be truly effective and accurate at field identification, we need to develop and cultivate both of these skill sets, combining them into an integrated approach that considers the whole bird in its surroundings as well as all of its details. Excerpted from Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding by Kenn Kaufman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
