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Speak Up

Fellow birder and long-time good friend Raymond Chiasson (the Campbellton Raymond) has taken me up on the request that I made in my first of these columns. He suggests that I offer several columns specifically addressed to new birders and their problems in trying to decided exactly what it was they just saw.

We have all had similar experiences, those of us who have developed some sort of reputation for knowing a bit about birds. The phone will ring, or someone will stop me on the sidewalk to describe this bird that he or she has never seen before and simply cannot find in the bird guides.

Nearly always, a bit of careful listening and questioning will gradually lead to a solution; others though remain a complete mystery. This latter happens because the observer has not seen what he or she thinks, to be quite blunt about it. That is not intended as a derogatory or unfair comment; it merely illustrates an ongoing problem with identifying birds.

Generally, the problems centre around interpretations of colour, size and body proportions of the bird in question. Over the next while, I will take the time to examine each of these issues in more detail than I can possibly provide in this one effort. For today, then, I will simply point out a couple of general factors to consider. First of these is that the bird you have just seen will be in a bird guide somewhere, unless it is an exotic creature that has just escaped (or been released) from someone's cage. That means that if you have a good birding guide but still can't find the bird, you have misinterpreted something. None of us is going to discover a previously unidentified species, not in this part of the world anyway.

The second follows from this: the good guides (Peterson, Sibley, National Geographic among others) are very good, but they are only guides. There is no way that even the best of them can describe or portray a bird that has just endured a couple of days of rain, or that is in the process of moulting, or that is sitting in shadow, or that just may be a bit odd (and there are lots of them).

Birds look different in different circumstances, sometimes disturbingly so. One of the most elementary lessons, then, is to learn to look beyond these differences to those points that do distinguish a robin from a blue jay, even in very challenging circumstances.