Birding by Sight

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. The feet on ducks, obviously, are webbed and are quite distinctive in other species of birds. Like most perching birds and song birds, birds typically have 3 slender toes facing forward and a fourth toe facing backward, and they use that to perch on branches. In wading birds like great blue heron and shore birds, for example, the legs are very long as are the toes. In species, for example, like humming birds, the feet are very tiny and are hardly visible at all when the bird is perched. So there's all manner of topographical things that are important to look at on a bird and having some sense as to where the various body parts are can be very useful as you begin to look at a bird, and also as you begin to describe in your notes where the patterns are. In the bufflehead, for example, it has a big white patch on the top of an otherwise dark head. It has big patches of white set off against a black back, and the under parts, the breast and the belly in this species will be white. So that knowing where these body parts and how they relate to one another can be very useful in terms of reading a field guide description of the bird and also how you describe the bird in your own notes so that when you go back to the book you can hopefully match up what you've seen with the illustration and the field guide. "