Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding

1. AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TOFIELD IDENTIFICATION OF BIRDSIn the two decades since the first edition of Advanced Birding was published, theamount of information available has increased by staggering amounts. Inthe late 1980s, a serious birder’s reference library on ID would have includedGulls: A Guide to Identification by P. J. Grant, Shorebirds: An IdentificationGuide by Peter Hayman et al., and a handful of detailed articles fromBritish 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 somany fine articles have been published that it is impossible to keeptrack of them all. In the late 1980s, Peter Pyle had just produced a firstslim guide to the molts and plumages of songbirds. Today that guidehas been superseded by two fat volumes by Pyle, totalling over 1,500 pages, detailing molt, plumage sequences, and geographic variation ofevery North American bird. In the late 1980s an expert birder askedme, in all seriousness, whether the Pomarine Jaeger even has a distinctplumage as a juvenile. Today it takes a few clicks on the Internet tofind dozens of photos of this plumage, and many of these actually areidentified correctly! What had been a trickle of published material hasbecome a torrent. While the challenge formerly had been to find basicinformation on identifying most birds, the challenge now is to siftthrough 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 onidentification of 34 species pairs or groups, providing information thatwas not readily available to most birders. Simply updating that booknow without changing its focus would hardly serve a useful purpose,because virtually all birders have access to vastly more information todaythan 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 itadded materially to what is already available. So in this edition I havetaken a different approach altogether, and the focus here is on how toidentify birds, or how to learn to identify birds. In other words, it’s notabout memorizing field marks, it’s about truly understanding whatyou see and hear. Most of this book, then, consists of a thorough exploration of howto look at birds and how to listen to them, how to come to grips withthe special challenges of each group of birds. Unlike many field guides,this one is not designed for quick reference in the field. The best timeto study it is before going out to look at birds. The first seven chapterswill help orient you to universal aspects of bird recognition. Then, ifyou’re heading to the tidal flats or the sewage ponds, read the chapteron learning to identify shorebirds. If you’re heading to a hawkwatchsite, 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 beuseful in their own right, but they also illustrate various principles: thechallenges involved in identifying jaegers, for example, are very differentfrom those we encounter with Empidonax flycatchers. As you masterthe identification of more groups of birds, you will develop the kindof background knowledge that makes it easier to learn even more.SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: IMPRESSIONS VS. FEATHER-EDGESSince the 1980s, the birding world has put a lot of discussion into twodistinct 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 thepattern of individual feathers (this may be referred to, sometimes witha hint of sarcasm, as the “feather-edges” approach). Both of these styles seem to be at least partly a reaction against thesystem of simplistic field marks. Under that system, everything was reducedto simple on-off characters: the bird has wing bars or doesn’t, ithas streaks below or doesn’t, and so on. That approach, ignoring boththe obvious aspects of shape and the subtle nuances of fine detail, ledto a lot of superficial identifications and a lot of potential for error.Simple field marks hold many traps and pitfalls for the unwary. Bothof these other approaches, impressions and feather-edges, have theirdrawbacks and their strengths, and a serious birder will work on developingboth. Identifying birds by impression has been called “the new Cape Mayschool of birding,” which would be a surprise to the experts who werepracticing this approach in California in the 1960s or in Massachusettsin the 1940s. Still, this style of ID has been raised to a higher level andwell 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 subconsciouslycapable of using this approach. We may use it frequentlyin other contexts. If we know a person well, we may recognize her fromhalf 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 byalmost subliminal hints of its shape and actions. An experienced birderseeing a speck soaring slowly over a faraway ridge might identify it as aTurkey Vulture without being able to discern a single detail. An experiencedbirder seeing a flock of birds wheeling tightly in the air over adistant mudflat might identify the birds as Dunlins, even without beingable to see anything of color or markings. In these cases, factors ofplace, season, habitat, and probability are added to clues provided byshape and actions to create an identification that seems almost intuitivebut in fact is based on real evidence. Identifying birds by looking at fine detail is an approach that goesback even further — to the days when most birds were identified inthe hand. Until the latter part of the 20th century, of course, such finepoints usually couldn’t be seen in the field, but optics today are so goodthat we often can see details of individual feathers — either in the field,or in digital photos later. This has allowed birders to rediscover some ofthe same technical details that were familiar to museum ornithologistsa century ago and to employ in the field some of the same fine pointsthat are used by banders examining birds in the hand. This kind of detailedstudy opens up many avenues for identifying the age and sex andsubspecies of a bird, not just its species, in ways that simply would notbe possible in birding by general impression. Both of these approaches — impressions and fine details — havetheir advantages and drawbacks. An experienced birder may identifymany birds by quick impression and may be highly accurate with thisapproach, 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 changetheir superficial appearance. External factors such as lighting can alsochange the way a bird looks, and weather can have a major impact —for example, birds fly differently and even perch in different posturesin strong winds. For reasons like these, our first impression of a birdmay be seriously off base. If we merely mistake one common speciesfor 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 tofollow up by checking on more specific points. It might seem that the other approach — the close-up, detailedapproach — would be less prone to error, but there is such a thingas looking at the feathers and missing the bird. British humorist BillOddie once pointed out that a detailed description of a Sky Lark couldbe passed off as a detailed description of a Pectoral Sandpiper, so longas it didn’t say too much about the bird’s size or shape! In actual practicethis kind of thing doesn’t happen too often, but there have been anumber of cases in which birders got rather far along in identifying anodd bird to age or subspecies even though they had the species (or eventhe family) wrong. So any detailed study of feather-edges might be onmore solid ground if birders were to start by stepping back and lookingat the whole bird and its relation to its surroundings. These two approaches might be compared to two methods of learningto read. Popular at one time was the “look-say” method, in whichchildren were taught to recognize the appearance of whole words, withless attention to individual letters. The early results of this were impressive,with two-year-olds proudly recognizing and pronouncing wordssuch as “cat” and “horse.” However, this approach left the young readersill-equipped to figure out words that they didn’t recognize. At theother extreme, the phonics method focused on the sounds of individualletters (as confusing as those may be in written English), teachingchildren to sound out letters, syllables, and words. This approach wasslower at the start but it was shown to produce readers who ultimatelywould know more words. In practice, of course, once we learn to read, we readily recognizewhole words. We see a word like “incredible” and we don’t have tosound out the letters or stop to think whether the “c” is hard or soft; theword registers in a flash and we’re on to the next word. Only when wehit an unfamiliar word does our grasp of phonics come into play, as wepause to try to pronounce the word and consider what it means. Similarly, our first identification of a bird may involve careful considerationof details, but once we know it well we may name it at aglance by impressions alone. Only when we see an odd individual orunfamiliar species, or see a bird under misleading conditions, or wantto determine more than just the species involved, might we go back tothe careful analysis of fine details. This book will focus mainly on details and concrete field marks, becausethat is the necessary approach for someone dealing with a new orunfamiliar bird. I could go on for pages describing the flight behaviorof a Pomarine Jaeger, for example, but until you have seen that birdfor yourself and watched it flying, such a description would be almostmeaningless. Once you have spent a lot of time watching PomarineJaegers, you may be able to name them instantly by their bulky shape,broad inner part of the wing, powerful wingbeats, etc., but first youhave to see those things on birds of known identity, and to know theiridentity you have to see the kinds of details that this book describesand illustrates. I know that some beginners are tempted to try to recognize birdsby impressions right off the bat. It is tempting to take this shortcut, tobypass 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 seesa distant hawk flying, decides that its wingbeats look only moderate inspeed, and calls it a Cooper’s Hawk. The next distant hawk seems tohave faster wingbeats, so he calls it a Sharp-shinned Hawk. If the firstbird was actually a Red-shouldered Hawk and the second was a Cooper’s,our birder has started to build a mental reference library that isflawed from the outset. Of course there’s nothing wrong with watchingthe actions of distant unknown hawks, but we shouldn’t use our impressionsof them as a basis for comparison. That should be reservedfor birds that we have definitely identified by specific details. Therefore, this book’s focus on detail is not meant to deny the importanceof impressions; it merely acknowledges that details can belearned from a book while impressions must be learned through actualexperience. To be truly effective and accurate at field identification, we need todevelop and cultivate both of these skill sets, combining them into anintegrated approach that considers the whole bird in its surroundingsas well as all of its details.