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
According to Isaac Asimov, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’, but ‘that’s funny…’.” Likewise for cracking the conundrum of similar-looking but different birds. Say for instance that you see a bird that at first glance looks like a swallow or a martin, but something tells you “it’s not quite like I would have expected it to look like”. Then you start leafing through your “birds of the Mediterranean” bird guide, and come across the red-rumped swallow – bingo! Well, obviously you need to have it confirmed by people in the know, but the first important step is that feeling that something is out of whack.
Many birding books try to lull you into a false sense of security by pointing out that without realising it, you already know quite a few birds, so you’re already halfway there towards becoming an accomplished birder. Simon Barnes calls them (and that includes me) “bad birders”. This makes it sound that all you have to do is persevere and you’ll reach the top of the stairs of birding knowledge one step at a time.
What they don’t tell you is that the staircase you’re climbing is not one of a constant incline, but gets steeper as you progress to higher levels. The first dilemmas are those of birds that at first glance look pretty similar, but with due care and attention can be recognised for what they are: telling a song thrush from a mistle thrush, a crow from a raven, a curlew from a whimbrel, a shag from a cormorant. I’ll tell you a secret: I’m more or less at the stage that I can make an educated guess at what is what in this category, and chances are that I’m right 70% of the time. And I’m not too sure that I’ve made all that much progress in the last few years.
Maybe my problem is that I tend to work on my own, hence don’t get to hear handy tips and shortcuts from someone in the know, so my accumulation of tidbits of bird lore tends to be slow. Then again, I prefer this organic approach – at least this type of knowledge is more likely to stick than something that has been studied as for an exam. Still, there’s more to come; the biggies are to come to grips with the various types of duck, the multitude of similar-looking waders, various birds of prey only glimpsed while they flit through the sky, the many different types of LBJ such as pipits and larks, and last but not least the various types of warblers which are often masters at skulking out of sight on top of being LBJs with few distinguishing features.
The final bugbear of mine is bird song: I’m not really that good at recognising individual songsters in the dawn chorus, and often after I’ve become familiar with one or two I tend to forget them through lack of persistent drilling of the tunes into my brain. Obviously the simple ones, such as the cuckoo, or the chiffchaff will be known to most people. To this I can add the toy machine gun sound of the magpie, the laughing of the green woodpecker, the explosive call of the Cetti’s warbler, and both the fluid song and the pinging alarm call of the blackbird. More recently I have added the song thrush, the dunnock and the wren to my repertoire of birds I can recognise with relative ease, but those are exceptions. Even the robin’s song I haven’t properly memorised in my head, and quite often I have to allocate a probability to a song coming from a robin based on the fact that during the period August to February there’s few competitors for the dawn or any other chorus.
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 