This is part 2 of a 3 part series. See also:
When you’re just starting out on the bird language path, it can feel pretty overwhelming. Each time you start listening your ears are assailed by a veritable menagerie of calls, and each call comes from a different species of bird. It’s enough to make you want to chuck your binoculars in the river and take up rare coin collecting. But please don’t do that, ok – the world doesn’t need another coin collector, it needs kick-ass naturalists. So, start making bird species ID sheets instead.
Bird ID notes don’t have to be princely works of art but because you need to put something where the bill is, you are forced to look carefully at the bird’s bill, and because you need to join the head to the feet somehow, there’s no choice in the matter but to really take a look at what the neck and belly look like…you get my drift? The (to me) rather unpleasant action of having to draw what I think I see in the field, compels my brain to scan the bird more closely and for longer, so I don’t always end up drawing a demented chicken.
Telling my brain to ‘please notice things about this new bird’ so that I might reasonably sketch its principal features (and hopefully identify it) not only helps me to look harder at that particular bird, especially where I have blank (or chicken-like) parts of the drawing, but also sharpens my overall observations skills for noticing important identifying features on other birds. Once you fumble your way through sketching out a dozen varieties of bird bills, you’ll start to see subtle qualities of bills during real time observations, and then start to join that dot to other dots concerning what it DOES with that bill.
To illustrate my point, I’m going to reference a bunch of awesome field sheets drawn by a young fella from the US that I recently stumbled across on the internet. His name is Andrew Westphal, he’s 11 years old and he’s one cool little dude. Check out some of his bird ID notes:
2 thoughts on “Record keeping 2: Bird Identification Sheets”
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