The Fundamentals of Birding by Sight

Series Summary

There are many aspects to birding, one of which is a technique called birding by sight. This involves identifying birds by their topography, or external anatomy, and other physical characteristics such as flight pattern. Important topography features that bird watchers use to identify birds include: the shape of the bird's beak, markings and feather color, as well as feet or talon shape. If you would like to identify birds by sight, learn from our birding expert from the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

In this free online video series, learn about birding by sight from Wayne R. Petersen, Director of the Massachusetts Important Bird Areas Program at the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Wayne will teach you how to identify birds by sight with tips such as how to identify ducks and geese, how to identify shore birds, how to identify birds of prey such as hawks, eagles, and owls, how to identify wading birds such as the Great Blue Heron, how to identify song birds, and how to record your sightings. Learn also about birding in woodland, wetland, and grassland areas.

Video Transcript

"Hello! Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Peterson and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts where we'll be talking about bird identification and some of the equipment and essential tools that are useful to get one started in this incredibly interesting pastime. One of the things that's very important as we begin to think about identifying birds in the field is to sort of understand what we need to look for. We mentioned briefly the topographical features of the bird, but there are other things in addition to the physical appearance of the bird. For example, habit. We're in a meadow here at Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary where we have a pond behind me and fields and meadows in this direction, so that obviously there are certain birds that we can reasonably expect in these kinds of habitats. At the same time, we can use behavior. For example, the way a bird flies. Wood peckers and gold finches, typically have a very strongly undulating flight as they travel. Other birds like the eastern king bird typically fly on the tips of their wings and have a very peculiar flickering flight, swallows like these purple martins off to my left here, skim and swoop so these would all be behavioral features that would be very useful in helping you identify an unfamiliar bird. In general, when we first see a bird, we want to try and put it into some sort of a category. This of course can be based on the way birds are classified and in fact, in most of the popular field guides today, birds are actually grouped and organized based on their scientific classification. If we start with the water birds, which typically occur first in the taxonomic higher arky that's typical of most field guides, we are obviously looking at fairly large birds. Many of which in deed are associated with wetlands, as appose to many of the forest and woodland birds that would be much smaller and would obviously be more settle in terms of some of their identification characteristics. So as we move forward through some of these different groups of birds, we would be using different characteristics and different features as we begin to put them into categories that can be useful for field identification. "