I was musing on the value of learning bird topography this morning, wondering why it is so important to know the greater coverts and supercilium and all the rest. The easy answer is that it gives us a framework to describe the color patterns of birds, but I think there’s even more to it than […]
Bird Topography – How it helps identify birds Read More »
Most birds have a very different pattern on the upperside and underside of their wings. On the coverts (the leading edge of the wing) this is easily explained because we are looking at entirely different feathers above and below. On the primaries and secondaries, however, there is just a single layer of feathers. How can
Wings, above and below Read More »
The feathers along the side of the lower jaw have a very confusing history of terminology. They’ve been called the malar stripe (in many early and mid 20th century bird books), the submoustachial ((Because this was a British proposal, the spelling is British “moustache” rather than the American “mustache”, and American bird guides have continued
What is the submoustachial? Read More »
The feathers that grow on the sides of the head above the eyes of a bird are called the supercilium, and when they contrast in color with the adjacent feathers we call that an eyebrow stripe. There’s lots of variation in the shape of the eyebrow stripe, and in some closely-related species this can be
The changeable shape of the supercilium Read More »
One of the well-defined groups of feathers on the underside of a bird is what we call the breast. In reality, on songbirds these feathers grow from the front of the neck, extending down so that the tips of the feathers (which is all we can see) cover the foreparts of the body – the
Introduction to breast feathers Read More »
In previous posts here I’ve asked “How many rare birds do we miss?” and the related question “How many rare birds do we find?” Several recent rare bird discoveries provide a good chance to revisit these questions. Consider these recent discoveries:
Rare birds “under the radar” Read More »
As I work on the revision of my field guide I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how the book can assist the process of identification, and what information is most useful to a birder in the field. I’ve settled on the idea that there are two stages of bird identification, each one requiring
The two stages of field identification Read More »
A recent discussion on the ID-Frontiers listserver involved an immature gull photographed in Utah (photo by Norman Jenson here). The consensus (and I agree) is that it is a Western Gull based on plumage and shape. But questions arise from the fact that it looks barely larger than the California Gulls next to it –
Do “dwarf” birds exist? Read More »
A recent article by Tim Enthoven in the New York Times – Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence – offers some fascinating thoughts on judgment, expertise, and illusions of confidence, and it’s an interesting perspective from which to examine the challenge of bird identification. One of his key points is that confidence does not arise
Patterns of translucence in wing feathers provide useful identification clues for many species of birds – terns, gulls, hawks, and others. Generally the translucent parts of the wing are those where there are fewer layers of feathers to block the light, and less pigment in the feathers. I’ve written about this before in my book
The finer points of wing translucence Read More »