Reprinted from my March 19, 2006 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
With each passing day, the weather is getting warmer (finally). With warmer weather comes migrating birds. Over the next month my phone will ring with a call from a friend who has seen a bird that he/she cannot identify. It happens every year and the dialogue is all too familiar. "What color is the bird?", I ask expectantly. "Brown" is the response as if that will give me all I need to identify this bird.
There are a ton of brown birds out there. No help, so, I follow up with "What size is the bird?" "Gosh Dave, I’m not sure. Maybe as big as a crow, or maybe a robin, or maybe a bit smaller than a robin." Great. That narrows it down to a hundred species. The conversation continues, ending with no resolution. "Take a photo if you can," and we hang up.
Bird identification can be tough, especially for those just getting started. One problem are the field guides available. Field guides come in two forms. First are the guides that only have 30 or so of the most common birds. You literally identify birds using these "guides" by looking at the color pictures and hoping the bird you are looking at will be there. I guess they are fine for those who just aren’t interested in getting to know more about birds. But relative to identifying a bird in your back yard, they really aren’t much help.
Then there are the complete field guides that cover all species in the region or country. For the beginner, these guides can be rather intimidating.
Recently Jim Swan, a fellow outdoor writer from California, tipped me off to a better way to identify birds, and you need to go to www.whatbird.com to check it out. Once there you will discover that this web site was designed for folks interested in birds. But it is also a site that beginners can use to identify birds.
Before we get to that, let me tell you a bit about the site. First, it is used. In fact over 60,000 people a month visit the site. The home page has everything. There are job listings for people interested in bird work. There are links to buy bird seeds, bird houses, bird guides, binoculars, and other bird products. While there you can read how Mitchell Waite developed a very simple system that helps you identify birds with just a few clicks of the computer mouse. It is a simple step-by-step system, whereby you enter just one attribute of the bird at a time. Most web bird identification sites take the "enter it all at once" approach, but here you enter one field mark at a time.
Go to the top of the home page and click on "step-by-step search." This brings up a page of simple illustrations showing various bird attributes. You can list the location of the bird, or the shape or size, or bill shape or bill length or wing shape or the primary color of the bird. You might list that you saw the bird at a back yard feeder, or in a certain habitat. There are 881 birds in the data base, so the bird you are attempting to identify is most certainly there.
As you enter each attribute, you narrow down the potential list of matches to the bird you are trying to identify. It doesn’t matter which attribute you mention first. With each entry, the list of potential birds drops. Heck you can even start out by noting that the bird is brown. The approach moves you through a decreasing list of birds, easy to follow, and eventually, in just a short period of time, you’ve got your bird. At the end you will get a few pictures and your bird will be there. It is so simple.
There is also a "Bird Expert" section that helps you find a bird using simple questions. "In what state did you see the bird?" "What was the shape of the bird?" "What was the primary color you noticed?" As you answer each question, the list of possible birds decreases.
There is also a "Ask Our Experts" on line forum where you can email in questions on birds. I went there and had a good time reading all the questions folks send it. One person saw a grey flightless bird in their back yard. Turned out to be a guinea fowl. Another saw an orange bird on their vacation to Aruba and wanted to know what it was. (Are we still going to Aruba?)
This is a fun web site to visit. Next time you see a bird you cannot identify, just go to www.whatbird.com and you will become an instant expert. OK, back to my friend with the brown bird, size of a robin, I think...............
