ABA Blog

Spot Check

I hope I'm mostly preaching to the choir when I say that counting birds whenever possible (vs. just ticking species) is important for many reasons.  The folks at team eBird have summarized the importance of doing so and some basics to try when counting flocks in their excellent post, "Bird Counting 101".  For those facing more advanced counting situations they followed up with "Bird Counting 201".  Here I'd like to show one of my favorite ways to count big flocks of birds using digital photographs.

Bird photography is very useful beyond aesthetic reasons. For example, when documenting a rare bird or for use in identifying challenging species a few photos can be invaluable.  I have also found that flock shots (however janky) are great for counting bird numbers from the leisure of my laptop.  I know I'm not the first birder who has thought of this (indeed, one main way to census flocks of waterfowl etc. is to study aerial photos), but I'd like to share a few tips I've found to be helpful.

First, a great use for a zoom lens is to pull back to fit the flock into the frame.  Sometimes a modest point & shoot camera or smart phone may be even better than a telephoto if you are close to a big flock.  If you still can't fit the flock in, try to estimate how much of the flock you are getting in the image to use as your basis for multiplying your estimation later.  When I'm looking at an image on my computer, I like to use the paintbrush feature in Photoshop Elements (about any image processing software will have similar features), with the pixel radius set to about the body size of each bird.  This lets me count individuals by dabbing them each with a spot of virtual paint, eliminating re-counts.  I also like to change the color in sets of birds according to the general size of the flock (like every 10, 25, or 100 birds.)  This gives me a nice visual of each block of birds and helps me pick up where I left off if I lose count.  Not only does this give a really accurate count of the flock but I think it helps me improve my visualization of blocks of birds in the field if I can't get a shot to count later.  Here are a few examples of this technique that I've used to get a good count of birds in a flock.

 

 

The winter of 2007/2008 produced an amazing irruption of Bohemian Waxwings in Colorado.  Here is what I estimated to be about 1/3 of a flock in my Longmont neighborhood on 29 December 2007.  How many birds do you think are in this frame?

 

I arrived at 698 individual birds, each dabbed with a spot of color (in separately colored blocks of 100.) Click on the image to see the color dabs in higher resolution.)  Since I thought I was able to fit about 1/3 of the birds in the frame, I estimated the flock to be ~2100 birds.

 

Here's an example from last fall.  On 5 October 2012 an amazing overflight of Sandhill Cranes swept the overcast skies of Boulder.  Skein after skein of vocalizing birds traversed the city in the afternoon hours, and amidst my errands I swung into a Safeway parking lot to take a wide-angle shot of one wave.

 

To count the birds I tweaked up the brightness and contrast and then dabbed the birds in colored groups of 100, arriving at 378 birds.  By comparing this group to the multiple other skeins I saw flying by that afternoon I estimated my observation total at 2400 Sandhill Cranes.  Adding photos like this along with field notes to eBird checklists is a great way to make your friendly neighborhood eBird reviewer happy!!  

 

 

Like much of the United States, Colorado is in the midst of an historic redpoll irruption this winter.  On 24 November, 2012, I caught up to a large flock that had been reported frequenting Baseline Reservoir in Boulder.  When the flock picked up and whirled around I grabbed a shot with every bird in the frame.  Care to estimate the count before scrolling down??

 

 

 

 

In this frame I came up with 60 birds, here dabbed in color blocks of 10.  On a personal note, at the time I saw it, this flock was about triple the size of all of my prior cumulative redpolls in the state (a number that has since skyrocketed from several more large flocks I've encountered this winter.)

 

You don't even need a telephoto rig to try this technique- here's another Bohemian Waxwing flock (from Niwot, Colorado 22 Feb 2013) digibinned with my iPhone through the beta bins that I keep in my car.  I propped the binocular on my window (partially rolled up to achieve a good height) and clicked a few shots for a private census.  

This time spotting by 20s I came up with 160 birds in the cottonwood tree.

 

OK, ready for your homework?  See what you come up with on this one...  ◔_◔

Do You See What I See? A New Visual Search Tool from Google

 

Here are two truths:
1.Some people are always looking for easier ways to do hard things.
2.Technology can be amazing.

There are a lot of people anxiously waiting for WeBIRD, the promised birdsong equivalent to Shazam and MusicID, but they may have to wait a little bit longer. Music databases can make a match to a digitally produced song, but they can’t match you singing exactly the same song. The variations in the human voice make that kind of analysis a less than exact science. A person can recognize that you are singing Happy Birthday; Shazam can’t. Similarly, there is enough variation in birdsong that it’s very difficult to get a computer to recognize the nuances. You can teach one to recognize some of the songs some of the time, but a reliable tool is not available yet.

But can we use technology to recognize visual cues and help us to ID birds? New birders are being encouraged by some to post their birding photos to the Internet in order to get an ID, instead of using field guides or birding mentors. Crowd-sourcing identification is certainly one way to handle it, but it would  be much “cleaner” if we could somehow get the computer to do the work for us, wouldn't it? Enter Google Search by Image. Seriously! You can upload an image or provide a URL to images.google.com, and Google will search for similar images. How cool is that! Just click on the little camera at the right of the search field and follow the instructions.

When I learned of this, I knew an experiment was in order! I uploaded a picture of a Hermit Thrush, clicked “Search” and waited to see how Google would handle the difficult Catharus species challenge. My uploaded image shows at the top of the screenshot below:

Can you say “Epic Fail”? None of these pictures is even close, except for the background colour tones. None were even of birds, let alone thrushes. I guess I should have expected that. Maybe it was much too challenging. How about something simpler, like a Barred Owl? The Internet is crawling with owl pictures. This should be easy!

Sigh… Not even a little bit better. More diversity in the selection of “matches”, but still no birds and certainly no owls. Maybe the whole bird has to be visible. Here’s a Burrowing Owl, Google. What can you do with this?

Um, no. But it’s interesting to see how many celebrities resemble Burrowing Owls. Brangelina? The algorithm seemed to be focussing on color-matching. What about a bird with a distinctive color and shape? Easy--Great Blue Heron!

Eureka! It matched one! Admittedly it’s the fifth image the program chose, and it somehow thought that a better match for my heron was a staged suicide scene ( in the top row), but at least it got a bird, and the right bird at that!

I was prepared to completely dismiss this function as useless, but then an interesting thing happened. A birder from Ontario sent me a picture he took while visiting Vancouver to see the Red-flanked Bluetail. It was a great photo of a bird that he (and those I showed it to) identified as a Veery, an almost unimaginable bird to be in Vancouver this time of year. But with a Brambling and a Bluetail around, never say never, right?

People send me pictures all the time, but there was something about this report that made me suspicious. Spidey-sense, some people call it. I asked for more information, which did not come. I did a little online detective work and didn’t find anything reassuring. So I posted the report--along with my reservations--on the Vancouver birding bulletin boards, mindful of those who think that all rare birds should be reported and not wanting anyone to miss out on this potential rarity. Then I remembered the Google Search by Image tool. I uploaded my suspect image--another Catharus--and guess what? Here are the results:

Epic win! The person reporting this bird was a prankster (very funny-not!), my spidey-sense was on the mark, and within seconds, Google found the image in an almost-two-year-old blog post from Massachusetts. I don’t know what motivated the hoax, but I’m delighted that the perpetrator was found out before an onslaught of inevitably frustrated birders wasted their time.

For bird ID, Google Search by Image has a very long way to go. There are some things that humans can still do better than our current technology. But today, I, and all my lookalikes below,  are giving a big alula up to Google!

Let's zoom in, shall we?

I think that most readers of this blog are aware of the potential power of digiscoping, but I'd like to illustrate another example of the technique's utility from the Boulder Christmas Bird Count (which I compile) last 16 Dec.  In the weeks leading up to the count, a group of Tundra Swans had been seen in the count circle, frequenting a few area lakes.  This is a rare species on the count, only recorded 6 times on 70 prior counts.  A few of my trusty scouts tried to pin the birds down in the count-week days leading up to the event but dipped- the birds seemed to have moved on.  But on the morning of the count I got a text from Bill Kaempfer reporting them on Valmont Reservoir.  Nice!!  

By mid-afternoon I had finished my territory and had time to swing over to the mighty Valmont to have a gander for myself.  While this power plant-heated triple reservoir complex is a winter waterbird haven, the views from public overlooks range from far at best to recedingly distant most of the time.  The count territory team had permission to enter the complex for better viewing but I was going to settle for some long scope looks.  Still, the swans were great to see in the day's last sloping sunlight, cruising in the windy waters.  I put my Panasonic DMC-G5 rig (with a digiscoping-friendly Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R Lens) to my Nikon EDG 64mm scope and shot this video:

 

Notice anything different about one of the birds?  Indeed, one of them is sporting a neck collar.  Now, in full disclosure, I didn't make this discovery.  The neck collared-bird had been well documented in the weeks leading up to the count, and my buddy Christian Nunes had previously submitted the collar number to the USGS Patuxent Bird Banding Lab.  Still, it was my first encounter with the banded bird so I thought I'd try to read the collar at this new location and date.  Frustratingly, I was having trouble confirming the digits on the distant bird (eye fatigue from a long day's birding and wind shake didn't help either), so I snapped a series of digiscoped stills to see if I could pull out the code.

At this level, I think we can confirm the ID as Tundra Swans through traits such as the variable yellow lores and document the rarity well for our state's Christmas Bird Count reviewer.  But I still don't think I can read the neck collar.

By cranking both the scope and camera lens zoom up to nearly maximum levels, cropping the image, and applying some sharpening, the code reveals itself: U856, yellow horizontal numerals on blue (click to enlarge the pic if you can't read the collar.)

While I wasn't the first to crack the bird's code, it was gratifying to confirm that it was the same bird found weeks earlier and to contribute another data point in the bird's known history.  The USGS has gotten very streamlined in their responses to band reports, and I was emailed this certificate within a few days of submitting the collar code:

Pretty cool to know the bird was banded as an adult on the marshy flats east of Kotzebue Sound near the Bering Strait in NW Alaksa in the summer of 2010.  The banding site is about 2800 straight-line miles away from Valmont Reservoir!

Dunne, Sibley, and Sutton: Hawks in Flight

Hawks in Flight, second edition

by Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

335 pages, $26–hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 13648

 

Brian Sullivan reviews the new edition of a classic:

As a young hawk watcher at Cape May in the early 1990s, I thought the authors of Hawks in Flight were magicians. Pulling identifications out of thin air, they put names to raptors at the outermost limits of vision, recognizing patterns and keying in on subtleties of shape and flight style. At first I was incredulous: There was no way they could be getting every bird. But time after time, as distant hawks and falcons approached and finally showed their classic “field marks,” these guys were right. It wasn’t long before I was absorbing everything I could from them: It was the Cape May School of Bird Identification, and class was in session! I would never look at birds the same way again.

The first edition of Hawks in Flight was published in 1988. Modeled on Richard F. Porter and coauthors’ Flight Identification of European Raptors, this book for the first time showed North American raptors as birders could expect to see them in the field; even better, Hawks in Flight provided what was perhaps the first truly engaging writing on the topic, describing raptors in colorful and memorable phrases and boiling down field marks to their essential components. Hawks in Flight became my bible, and I went to church a lot, studying every word and line drawing. To this day, I still hear Pete Dunne’s words each time I see a Merlin dashing past like a Harley Davidson or an American Kestrel gliding by like a scooter.

It was with great excitement that I opened the long-awaited second edition of this masterly work, poring over the pages like a kid on Christmas morning. This new edition is a marked improvement visually, thanks to the addition of a suite of color photos illustrating each species (the original edition’s illustrations were all black and white). And by adding eleven range-restricted species to the twenty-three more widespread species treated in the first edition, the second now includes all the breeding raptors of North America north of Mexico, offering valuable information for the identification of a number of birds not often seen by most hawk watchers.

Digging deeper, I was happy to see that most of Pete Dunne’s witty and unique text has been retained. All of the species accounts have been edited and updated, sometimes at a slight cost to the original book’s distinctive style; though the revised accounts temper some of the original book’s more colorful statements—in some cases with good reason, in some cases probably not—the prose is still engaging, memorable, and informative, three qualities not often found together in bird books. Few writers can match Dunne’s cleverness in writing about birds, and I was glad to see that most of the lines that stuck with me twenty years ago are still there. I won’t be alone in that assessment: It’s common at hawk watches to hear observers reciting lines from the original Hawks in Flight.

David Sibley has contributed black and white line drawings to both editions; in another context, that medium might seem a bit dated, but in the case of hawk identification, colors and the intricacies of plumage are often less informative than are general patterns of dark and light or an unknown bird’s shape and flight style. Sibley’s drawings nearly always hit the mark, and I was glad to find that some that were slightly off in the first edition have been updated for this second: Compare, for example, his treatment of the upperparts of the juvenile Northern Goshawk, where the critical tawny mottling on the upperwing coverts, missing from the original edition, is now shown perfectly. Most species are illustrated in adult and juvenile plumages, and some are depicted in a range of morphs and geographic variations. Where these drawings excel is in communicating what the birds really look like in the field; with few exceptions, the shapes are right on, and Sibley’s rough vignettes showing species in direct comparison are certainly a highlight of the book.

The most obvious visual improvement in the new edition is the color photographs. A few full-frame portraits are interspersed throughout the book to add curb appeal, but the real contribution made by the new photo material is to the species accounts. Where the first edition tucked its black and white photos into the back of the book, the new edition ends each species account with a selection of color images depicting a goodly range of variation in shapes and flight postures. Each photo caption identifies the bird’s age, sex, and subspecies wherever possible and appropriate. This is a great upgrade overall, though the occasional off-center or oddly sized images and poor use of page space are perplexing.

Any book as full of information and detail as this will inevitably contain a few errors. There are a few typos throughout the text, and it’s not hard to find mistakes in the captions’ assignment of age and sex (the color photo of an adult Gyrfalcon on p. 147, for example, is erroneously labeled juvenile). Even the worst errors here are relatively minor, but they will lead the inexperienced reader to make mistakes.

Nonetheless, Hawks in Flight excels in teaching birders to identify raptors to the species level. While it understates some of the more complex challenges, the real key here is in any case getting the species right; across the entire range of the Red-tailed Hawk, to take a familiar example, 99% of birds of that species will be identifiable using the set of basic characters presented here to full satisfaction.

Where there is cause for significant complaint is in the book’s tendency to oversimplify complex topics such as geographic variation and aging. If we’ve learned anything in the twenty years since Hawks in Flight was first published, it’s that many birds don’t fit the mold. A simplified approach to complex matters can lead to misinformation and confusion. Taking as just one example the book’s discussion of a species I know well, the Red-tailed Hawk, we find misleading generalizations about subspecies; even though the reader is reminded that there are caveats, the treatment remains questionable. For instance, the subspecies Buteo jamaicensis “abietinus” is here designated the “Eastern Canadian Red-tailed Hawk,” even though this poorly understood population—currently lumped by most authors with B. j. borealis, the Eastern Red-tailed Hawk—was in fact described from the northern Canadian spruce-fir forest west to Alberta, not necessarily the eastern portion of it, and its scientific name is actually B. j. abieticola.

The mere mention of this population here is confusing, as are the statements justifying the book’s exclusion of two subspecies: “The Pacific Coast and Florida Red-tailed … share plumage characteristics that are fundamentally similar to the basic Eastern or light-morph Western Red-tailed Hawks.” In reality, these two subspecies are quite different from both Eastern and Western Red-tails, but little has been published about them, making them harder to deal with than the better-known subspecies.

The treatment of the Harlan’s Red-tailed Hawk, largely correct at its core, also introduces many inaccuracies. Our understanding of this taxon is still evolving, but statements such as “the back and upperparts are blackish (not brown)” are incorrect: Many are brown-backed, especially in summer. The barred outer primaries that are such a great field mark for juvenile Harlan’s are inaccurately described here as characteristic of adults—but all adult Red-tailed Hawks have similar variably patterned outer primaries. The book also mentions the “curious gray patterning on the flight feathers” of a light-morph adult Harlan’s (photo 21), but rather than pointing out that patterning as the excellent field mark that it is, the photo caption gives the impression that it is an anomaly. And oversimplified descriptions of tail patterns, such as “Westerns have banded tails and Easterns don’t,” are simply relics: We know today that many Westerns have plain tails that are identical to those of typical Easterns (as photo 7 plainly shows), and vice versa. Categorical statements to the contrary result in errors in the field, and tempt observers to assign birds to subspecies without a firm understanding of the complexity of the issue.

My concluding thoughts are simple. The second edition of Hawks in Flight stands alone in its ability to connect people with raptors. By boiling in-flight identification down to its essence, it helps birders learn to see field marks that lie beyond plumage details. It is not enough to say that every hawk watcher should have this book on his or her shelf; every birder should have this book at hand, as the skills and techniques found here can be applied to all types of birding, helping birders like me move toward more advanced levels of field identification.

Brian Sullivan

Carmel Valley, California

heraldpetrel@gmail.com

- Brian Sullivan is eBird Project Leader at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Photo Editor for BNA Online and for the ABA’s North American Birds, and co-author of the forthcoming Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. His research interests include migration, conservation, and field identification, especially of seabirds and raptors. 

Burton and Croxall, eds.: A Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia

A Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia

edited by Robert Burton and John Croxall

Princeton University Press, 2012

200 pages, $24.95–softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books #13701

A scant dozen years after its foundation at the turn of this century, WildGuides is a small and active non-profit publisher producing natural history guides covering Britain and the world. Like such other exciting European ventures as the wonderful Crossbill Guides, WildGuides had gone largely unnoticed in America, but that has changed: Earlier this year, the imprint was acquired by Princeton University Press, which now makes available North American editions of all of the WildGuides titles, including this newest, produced for the South Georgia Heritage Trust, whose conservation efforts are supported directly by the proceeds from this book.

“Cold, cloudy, wet, and windy”—the authors of this guide are never less than honest—South Georgia lies nearly a thousand miles east and south of the Falklands. Its starkly beautiful landscape of snowy mountains and spectacularly abundant wildlife makes it the most popular of the subantarctic islands for visiting birders and tourists, attracted by the hordes of breeding penguins and pinnipeds.

Impressive as the wildlife spectacle remains today, South Georgia is far from pristine. Human exploitation of the island’s seals for blubber and fur began just a decade after Cook first landed here, and the next century and a quarter saw the near extinction of the fur seal, a species that has happily rebounded. The great whales, too, were taken in almost unimaginable numbers, as those of us who first learned about South Georgia from Robert Cushman Murphy’s Logbook for Grace will recall. And the region’s seabirds are in serious decline, threatened by longline fishing and introduced predators. The South Georgia Heritage Trust’s commitment to habitat restoration includes the most extensive rat eradication program in history: Phase I of that program, concluded in March 2011, left the areas around King Edward Point and Grytviken rat-free for the first time in 200 years, and the goal is to eradicate introduced rodents from the entire island by 2015, eliminating, it is hoped, what has become serious predation on the eggs and young of the island’s birds.

Today’s visitors are unlikely to notice these problems, their attention drawn instead by what is still the island’s rich abundance of wildlife. With this guide in hand, the birder or interested tourist will be able to identify nearly every plant and animal she encounters.

As the most conspicuous and, for many of us, the most sought-after organisms on the island, the birds and mammals occupy 90 of the book’s 200 pages. Each species is illustrated by at least one photograph, facing a prose account that covers distribution, identification, voice, and behavior. No fewer than seven plumage stages are shown for the Wandering Albatross, and a taxonomic note informs us that the breeding bird of South Georgia is the Snowy Albatross, Diomedea [exulans] exulans = “chionoptera”. Rare, unusual, or especially appealing species are also accorded short illustrated essays, treating, for example, the breeding cycle of the King Penguin or territorial behavior in the Antarctic fur seal.

Birders who look beyond the spectacle of the island’s seagoing animal life may be surprised by how few non-seabirds South Georgia can claim. Two waterfowl species, the South Georgia Pintail and the Speckled Teal, are resident, as are some of the breeding Snowy Sheathbills; the endemic South Georgia Pipit, a frequent victim of introduced rats, is the island’s only breeding passerine.    

South Georgia’s small size, remoteness, and harsh climate make it possible for the guide to go beyond coverage of the island’s conspicuous “macrofauna.” A dozen insects, including six beetles and six flies, are described and depicted, as are a springtail, a spider, a bird tick, two earthworms, a snail, and the largest free-living copepod species in the world. These are the invertebrates most likely to be observed by the non-specialist, though the island hosts another 200 or so species, among them more than 70 mites and ticks.  

Plants, too, including 25 native herbaceous angiosperm species and 16 ferns and club mosses, are treated, as are the island’s commonest or most conspicuous liverworts, lichens, algae, and fungi.

Such breadth of coverage makes of this book a true guide to wildlife. Birders so fortunate as to visit South Georgia will, naturally, also pack such essential and more detailed identification resources as Steve Howell’s Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels, but this guide will open the eyes of even the most single-minded fan of the feathered to the richness and complexity of this most spectacular of the subantarctic islands.  

Rick Wright

Bloomfield, New Jersey

rwright@aba.org

Kaufman and Kaufman: Field Guide to Nature of New England

I used to dream of a field guide that would let me identify everything I saw, a childish fantasy I gave up long ago: no book, no library can ever come close, not even for so relatively circumscribed and so relatively uniform a landscape as New England. Those six states are a big place, and "nature" is even bigger.

Certainty, Experts, and Confirmation

A couple of friends and I were birding around Jamaica Bay in New York a few years ago. We came upon a couple of people, a man and a woman, looking out over the water and discussing a bird perched in plain view, but a bit distantly, out in the marsh. They didn't seem to be birders (judging by their lack of optics), but one of them suggested it could be an Osprey. I took a look with my binoculars, easily saw the relevant field marks due to the benefit of magnification, and assured them that yes, it's an Osprey. The woman replied "Could be" as they were walking away.

Could be?! How could she doubt someone with expensive binoculars and birding experience? I had confirmed that it was in fact an Osprey, there was no doubt necessary, we now knew it was an Osprey, didn't we? In this post, I want to discuss how we confirm identifications, what we mean by expert, and how we ever know we are right. It is a treacherous subject, as birding reputations are built on accuracy and perceived infallibility, but I think it is a necessary discussion that may reveal a lot about the community of birders and our interpretations of other people's birding abilities.

What kind of hawk is this? Larger pictures available here. Read more about this bird below.

More recently, I found a hawk on our property. We haven't had a lot of raptors on our farm, not even migrants. I've been hoping for more buteos, and as soon as I saw this bird I knew it was a new species for us. However, I also knew it was going to be a tough ID. It seemed to be a young hawk, smaller than a Red-tail, perched on a dead branch in the morning fog. I immediately had it down to two species: Red-shouldered or Broad-winged. But which one? I quickly digibinned a few pictures, taking breaks to look more carefully with my binocular. I really wanted to see the top of the wings, so I decided to walk around the row of pine trees beside me and have a better angle on the bird's back. I quickly but quietly moved around the pines, and of course the bird was gone. Fortunately I had the pictures, and headed indoors to clinch an ID.

I started with reference books, but didn't find a definitive answer. I only saw the bird from the front, and young Red- shoulders and Broad-wings can be really similar from that angle. I was leaning toward Broad-wing (it was around the peak of their migration through the east), but I certainly wasn't leaning very strongly. I decided to seek outside help, get some other views on the matter. I emailed pictures to some of my birding friends and to the Ohio-Birds email list. One of my first responses was from the list, someone I didn't know. His name was John Blakeman, and he introduced himself: "Blake, I'm a master falconer and raptor biologist. The bird is a red-tailed hawk, clearly. But I'm not so sure it's an immature. Did you see the brown tail? The tail here looks too short for an immature. Immie RTs have tails about an inch longer than adults. But no doubt, a red-tail. --John Blakeman."

I panicked for a second. Wait, was this a Red-tail? Did I just jeopardize my birding reputation by asking for ID help on the most commonly seen hawk in the country? I went back to the pictures, and quickly assured myself that it indeed wasn't a Red-tail. How did I know? Well...it didn't look like one to me. I started to receive other replies; Haans Petruschke said, "...Looks like a Red-Shouldered Hawk. Others may say something else based upon plumage, but the eye structure and shape is pure Red-shouldered." Then another reply, "Immature Red Shouldered Hawk. (For what it's worth, raptors are my specialty.)" This last was another reply trying to convey the idea of knowledge and experience. Not confirmation necessarily, but just trying to indicate that they weren't some random person who started birding yesterday; they had time and experience and background with this subject. A couple of my birding friends agreed with Red-shouldered, but then a couple said Broad-wing, and then a couple more from the email list also said Broad-wing, so I was faced with a split vote. I really wanted to add this bird to our property list, so what to do?

I joined the ID-Frontiers email list to post a message about this bird. I included a link to the pictures, hoping to gain some insight from those on the 'frontiers of identification.' I knew that there were a few people on the Ohio-Birds email list who also subscribed to ID-Frontiers, but I hadn't heard an opinion from them. Based on the split vote, I thought that moving it up to a higher court was acceptable. But what do I mean by acceptable? Aren't birders available to help others, would anyone judge you for asking a stupid question? I mentioned to my wife I was thinking about emailing Sibley to get his opinion. She was incredulous: can you just email Sibley? I felt like it was an identification question that was worthy of expert advice; I'm not a new birder sending out a fuzzy picture of an obvious Brown Pelican. I have some idea what I'm talking about and didn't know what this hawk was, and other people couldn't agree, so I didn't think I'd be wasting anyone's time. I knew many respected birders were on ID-Frontiers, and I would get some good feedback. I received three responses; the one I weighted highest came from Bill Clark, co-author of the Peterson Field Guide to Hawks of North America. He said it was a Broad-winged, and I took that as the final answer.

I emailed the Ohio-Birds list, saying I'd accepted the expert testimony from ID-Frontiers (all in favor of Broad-wing). Case closed. John Blakemen replied, "Blake, You are certainly welcome to assign the ID of the hawk photo to a Broadwinged. But all of the Broadwings I've ever dealt with have distinct but subtle horizontal patterns on the breast, not the vertical ones on your provided photo...Redtails (except in the vary rare melanistic specimens) always have the central, upper breast lighter than the belly band or flanks of the upper breast (chest area), exactly as on your photo of your bird. Red-shouldereds and Broadwings have evenly hued coloration and evenly-patterned upper breasts. But the lack of horizontal patterning on the upper or middle breast negates a Broadwing for me, and the presence of a less-patterned, slightly lighter central area on the upper breast marks the bird as a Red-tail for me. I've trapped, banded, and rehabbed many dozens of Buteos in 40 yrs of working with these birds. John A. Blakeman".

I quickly did an internet search for John Blakeman. Who is this guy? Does he really have the credentials that he claims? I quickly found that yes, indeed he does. He has many years of hands-on experience with these birds. How do I decide which expert to believe, which claims to consider valid, how do I confirm an identification when it isn't clear-cut? The bird is gone, there is no way to get it back. We can't collect further evidence to make a final determination. What if everyone I consulted said it was a Broad-wing? What if they all said it was a Red-tail? Would I listen to the majority, or choose voices here and there? Maybe this bird was a hybrid, or a ghost (I mean a literal ghost, not one of the two species we sometimes call 'gray ghosts')?

My point is, we often have no way to be certain of our identifications. We see a bird, we put a name on it, and it flies away. We don't know whether we were right or wrong. Even if we move it to a higher authority, we can't know for sure if they were right or wrong. One of the people who corresponded with me suggested I try whatbird.com; the site includes a forum where people will help you identify birds. Many people post pictures, hoping to find someone knowledgeable to determine the bird's identity. Many times the responses say something like, "Chipping Sparrow. Confirmed." That is supposed to mean that the person doing the confirming knows what the species is, and they know that they are right. But how do any of us ever know that for sure?

When I decided to write this post, I emailed all of the participants in the discussion and asked whether it would be okay to use their names and responses. A couple were reticent at first, they wanted to check what they had said to me before having it thrust upon a larger birding audience. Why is that?

It is partly because birding credibility is fragile; there are people who think they are good at identifying birds, very willing to share their expertise, but who in fact lack those skills. People who are well-known in birding circles or make their living from birding-related enterprises are justifiably concerned about being lumped in with these other 'bad birders.' Unfortunately, this often keeps them quiet when a difficult identification arises. Sometimes the best identification is 'I Don't Know', but we don't usually want to admit that fact. Even worse is proposing an incorrect identification. This has the obvious side effect of stifling discourse and preventing knowledge from being shared. I was impressed when Birding began running photo quizzes where different birders explained their identification and how they got there. This prevented a consensus view from clouding perception and coloring judgment. Sometimes the experts differed, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Maybe there was no right answer (hybrids...or ghosts).

My point with this post is not to decide what kind of hawk is in the pictures, or decide which birders are better than others. I wanted to point out that we perceive different levels of birding expertise, and there are people and organizations we are more likely to believe. It isn't always clear why we choose to believe some people over others, or how we pick which 'experts' to consult. The next time you are out birding and run across someone grossly misinformed about the identification of a bird, feel free to do your best to correct their obvious error. Just remember, they may be trying to do the same thing for you.

Been Banding Lately?

Last weekend I had the pleasure of visiting an educational bird banding station run by the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory at Barr Lake State Park, just northeast of Denver.  Meredith McBurney and her team of volunteers do a fantastic job of engaging school groups, bird club trips, individual birders, and passers-by (the banding table is along a popular hiking trail.)  Meredith is amazing at explaining what's going on with each bird to anyone from pre-schoolers to folks with decades of serious birding under their belts.  Birds in hand catalyze discussions ranging from the esoteric to expressions of delight and amazement.  During my visit I compared and contrasted subtle Dusky vs. Hammond's Flycatcher features and pondered why silent fall "Western" Flycatchers in Colorado should be left at that instead of putting Cordilleran or Pacific-slope tags on them.  But equally cool topics included shared retinal wonderment at the vivid azure hues on a Blue Jay or amazement at the impossibly tiny bundle of migratory energy wrapped up in a MacGillivray's Warbler.

Birders of all ages & experience levels have much to learn at a bird banding station.

I've been to many banding stations throughout my birding life and always come away knowing more than I did before the visit.  My last trip also reminded me that bird banding is also a potentially good hook for beginners.  As a follow-up to the outstanding Pledge 2 Fledge initiative, perhaps you'd consider bringing a new birder to a banding station near you!  

Seeing what Peter Pyle says about determinging age & sex of Townsend's Warblers.

One last detailed look at a Townsend's Warbler before it continues on its way towards warmer climes for the winter.

Kids who mind their P's and Q's might even get to help release a bird like this MacGillivray's Warbler.

Studying in-hand nuances of birds like this Cassin's Vireo can help birders get a grip on tricky field IDs such as separating species within the Solitary Vireo complex.

 

ABA Debuts Birding News!

 

Since the early 1990’s at least, birders have been sharing news via e-mail subscription lists. These lists were a great way to keep up with the birding scene in a given region. But they weren’t always the most convenient things to work with, especially if you just wanted to check in on what’s going on in a region but didn't want to go through the process of subscribing, figuring out settings, managing e-mail flow, and so on.

Enter Jack Siler and Birdingonthe.net. Jack is a Philadelphia birder and ABA member who long ago saw a need for a single place where all these user-generated news feeds could be aggregated and easily accessed. Nothing like that existed, so Jack, who isn't officially a web programmer, went ahead and built it himself. His groundbreaking site, especially the BirdMail page, quickly became one of the most heavily trafficked and most beloved birding spots on the entire world wide web.

And for years, Jack has maintained the site with incredible dedication and attention to detail on which thousands have come to rely. But the time has come for Jack to move on to other things including, we hope, getting a well-deserved break from tending these particular fires.

We’re thrilled that Jack has honored us by passing the torch of his inspired marshalling of local, regional, national and international birding mail lists to the American Birding Association. The result is ABA's Birding News (birding.aba.org). We’ve worked hard and are working hard to preserve Jack’s vision while building an entirely new site that incorporates the expanded possibilites of rapidly evolving web technology. We hope you're as excited by the initial results and the possibilites for the future as we are.

We have updated the inner workings of the site, allowing us to archive more messages on each list (30 day’s worth, instead of just a couple dozen), and to filter the messages so you can easily see reports of rarities based on the ABA checklist codes. Additionally, we’ve plugged in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, so you can easily share messages that you find interesting, funny, provocative, or otherwise worthwhile with a huge audience that would have been highly unlikely to see them previously.

We at the ABA have always believed that the birding community is an immense storehouse of incredibly valuable and hard-won knowledge. And that birders know an awful lot about how to have a good time, plus some great stories of having some not-so-good times. We've always tried to shape and curate that knowledge and experience into useful things like the ABA/Lane Birdfinding Guides. Birding News is an attempt to do the same thing for the millions of bytes of birding information that go winging around the web every day. We want to make it all easier, more useful, and more fun.

The best part is, this is only the beginning. We can't wait to see what you, the birding community, make of Birding News. We promise to keep making it better, responding to your comments and suggestions, learning together as we all move forward. It's what birders do, after all.

We'll be talking a lot more, here and elsewhere, about Birding News. For now, go on over and have a look around. We think you're going to like what you see.

The address is easy. Say it with me: BIRDING dot ABA dot ORG! birding.aba.org Remember it. Visit it. Bookmark it, and the individual lists you visit often. And tell your friends.

Special congratulations are due to ABA's David Hartley and Greg Neise for their painstaking work setting this all up. They were aided by a succession of contract programmers, especially Greg Mahoney and Andy Sheppard. Thanks, too, to Carrie Hartley for a fresh but classic new look.

And finally, once again, thank you Jack Siler! For your hard work, your creativity, and your involvement in the birding community. We can't begin to express our gratitude that you've trusted the ABA with your baby. We aim to make you, and all birders, proud.

Why Is Sound So Hard?

One of the skills most birders use is the ability to recognize birds by the sounds they make. In most bird groups (seabirds being an obvious exception), each species (and sometimes subspecies or regional variations or even individuals) can be recognized by the sounds that it makes. If you've spent much time around serious birders, you've probably heard names mentioned, people who are extraordinarily good at recognizing the sounds birds make. If you've ever spent a fall migration morning on top of Cape May's Higbee Dike, you have probably witnessed some of these amazing events of bird ID, as experienced birders are able to pick out a flight call to identify a bird that most people didn't even realize was around. I used to work with someone who could identify birds in her sleep...she would use certain species as an alarm clock to know when to wake up in the morning. Let me make it clear right now, I am not one of those people.

I find identifying birds by sound to be extremely difficult. I don't know why, maybe it is because I am more of a visual learner. Regardless of the reason, keeping a bird song in my head is often almost impossible. It was probably after about 5 years of birding that I started being able to recognize anything other than the most common bird songs. Northern Cardinals were my default answer: no matter which species was singing, there was about a 75% chance that I would think it was a cardinal. There were times that I felt like I was doing better, but then I would hear a Carolina Wren and say to myself "Oh, a cardinal." That happened often enough that I knew not to trust my sound IDs, that they were always suspect. I'm starting to get better now (after about 12 years of pretty serious birding, including field work on birds in multiple states and countries), but it still falls apart sometimes. I'll be happily birding along, and then I'll hear a song. I'll recognize it, but not quite know to whom it belongs. In fact, it happened this morning. As background, about 10 years ago my friend Tom and I were birding in Ohio near Lake Erie. We were both still learning at the time, and there was a bird sitting up in a tree singing. It just kept singing, over and over again. We were having a tough time getting a look at it, and listened to the song, without knowing its identity, for nearly half an hour. It finally moved enough for us to get a good look at it, and we realized it was a Warbling Vireo. As we walked away, Tom said "Well, at least we'll never forget that song." I had no recollection of the song. This morning, I was tracking down migrants at one of my usual birding spots. There was a song I kept hearing, a real sing-songy song, repeated many times. I looked and followed and looked and finally got my binocular on it. Warbling Vireo. After all of these years, a relatively common bird with a distinct song continues to confuse me.

The reason I've mentioned these things is to encourage those birders who have a tough time with bird song. It is not easy for everyone, and most of us will never be as good as the experts. However, the more you work at it (spending time in the field listening, reviewing CDs, or perhaps using some of the new song-teaching software), the better you'll be. Don't expect to recognize every bird song every time, and try not to be frustrated when you get one wrong. There are a lot of us who have troubles. Stick with it, it will get better.