Index – Intro – Ch.1 – Ch.2 – Ch.3 – Ch.4 – Ch.5
Ch.6 – Ch.7 – Ch.8 – Ch.9 – Ch.10 – Ch.11 – Ch.12 – Ch.13
How does it feel to become interested in birds late in life? Granted, chances are that even a non-birder will know more than a handful of common birds. But if you haven’t had a childhood fascination with birds, that’s all you can fall back on, and not a richness of past experience. In addition, my first few decennia were spent in West-Flanders, so I can’t compare with how it used to be in Britain during my childhood.
So let’s take stock. I can recognise a blackbird or a magpie without too much trouble, because I see them quite often and there’s few other birds to confuse them with. This recognition goes beyond the mere look of them, but also the way they sound or fly.
Beyond this I start to fall back on the way they look, without the richness of other interactions. And that’s where it can start to go wrong: even common birds like chaffinches or robins can become hard to recognise if you only catch a glimpse, and you have no fail-safe way of identifying them. Granted, the red breast of a robin is a dead giveaway, but you don’t always see it when its back is turned, or when it flies across the woods in poor light. Things are even worse when it comes to identifying birds by sound. Some clearly are unmistakable, such as the cuckoo (which I’ve only heard on a small number of occasions in the UK) or the chiffchaff, but in many cases I need to see the bird in combination with getting some audible prompts to be sure of their ID in the wild.
A good case in point is the jackdaw. If you have a good view of one or a crowd of them on the ground, they’re pretty easy to identify. However, in flight high up in the sky is a bit more tricky: black corvid of indeterminate size, and no good view of the bill could be a jackdaw, a rook, a carrion crow or a raven. Granted that probability says that any such bird in large groups is more likely to a jackdaw or a rook, but it often is their call that settles it and makes the identification rise from “probable” to “definite”.
For the time being I am fairly confident that 138 bird species I can recognise on sight, provided I have a good view of them. A small number I can recognise at a glance, but they’re usually the larger birds. Of these, I can also recognise 26 by their sound. On top of that there are 2 (Cetti’s warbler and chiffchaff) that I can recognise from their sound, but not confident that I could do likewise from sight alone.
The fascination with the unusual, whilst ignoring the common birds. You even see it in collections of nature happenings throughout the year. Birds of prey feature high on the list, and even though your run-of-the-mill tit or finch is far more likely to be seen by your average or less-than-average birder, this singular fact is often not reflected in many a bird book.
Index – Intro – Ch.1 – Ch.2 – Ch.3 – Ch.4 – Ch.5
Ch.6 – Ch.7 – Ch.8 – Ch.9 – Ch.10 – Ch.11 – Ch.12 – Ch.13
Marnix's Bird Gallery 