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csziggy

(34,120 posts)
5. Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a great bird site
Fri Oct 2, 2015, 10:13 AM
Oct 2015
http://www.allaboutbirds.org

The Birding Basics page has resources for getting started. Their Bird ID pages (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/browse.aspx?shape=6,33) help you learn how to look at the birds so you can figure out what they are - they start with the basic shape of the bird, then color, then other features. As you try to identify the birds the pages for each species give details of habitat, range and similar species. For many species you can listen to the bird calls and watch videos of them.

You can even register and set up a list of the birds you have added to your life list - the list of the birds you have seen and identified.

They have a Merlin Bird ID which can be loaded on smart phones so you can use their resources which in the field. And the newest part is Merlin Photo ID (http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/photo-id/) - you can upload a photo and it will attempt to ID the bird from the picture. The photo ID is not reliable yet but they are trying to improve it so the more people use it the better it should get.

I like taking pictures of birds for ID purposes - then you can more easily compare the various aspects of the bird you saw to the pictures in the guides. For instance, my husband got a photo of a bird in the woods where it was too dark to see much about its features. He thought it was a bird that should not have been in that area. Once we downloaded the photos and looked on a computer screen the beak was more visible and we were able to identify it as an immature white ibis. Without a photo that bird might have been a mystery to us forever!

As for guides I prefer the Peterson's Field Guides. Roger Tory Peterson's books point out the most important markings and features and gives you similar species to help you narrow your search. The Sibley books are very good and give more information about life cycles and habitat than Peterson. My least favorite of the guides we have is the National Geographic one. While it is nice to see photos of the birds even in the same species individuals can look very different. With a photo it is harder to figure out which features can be variable within a species and which features are definitive for it.
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