How to Identify Song Birds by their Beaks

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 last group of birds that we're going to discuss in terms of identification are the song birds, the perching birds. And if you pick up a typical field guide, usually at least half the field guide is devoted to these birds. There's lots of different kinds. And, in many cases, their identification can be a little tricky. Birds like Sparrows and Warblers, for example, are well known to be somewhat notorious, particularly in the case of the Warblers in their autumn plumages when they're less distinctive. But, as we indicated at the top of this segment, one of the things that we want to look for first is the structure of their beak. Because the bill structure of many birds is very distinctive and it's a way that we can put a bird into a family. Getting birds into small closely related groups in our mind is one of the first steps to ultimately establishing a correct identification. So, in the case of the seed eating birds, they're going to have rather thick, stout, conical beaks used for crunching seeds as well as insect eating. And then, things like Warblers, for instance, which are very typically insect eaters. They have these little, thin, needle like bills. Hummingbirds long, slender beaks for getting into flowers for nectar, for instance. There are other groups of birds like some of the peculiar night birds, like the Nightjars, things like the Whippoorwill we talked about earlier, the common Night Hawk that have very tiny beaks but huge mouths that open up and are used for capturing insects on the wing at night. So, their bills are really not used for breaking food, it's more a matter of just simply being a way to guide food into their mouth. So, that we have a variety of structural adaptations associated with the beak."