Why can’t we identify birds?
By Charlie • June 8, 2009 • 16 commentsBirding guru Kenn Kaufman left a very interesting comment on our post about Richard Crossley’s upcoming new book (which I very deliberately titled ‘Could this be North America’s best ID Guide‘ as perhaps it could be if the text - which I’ve not seen - matches the excellence of the plates) in which he says that, “During the last decade or two, the level of identification skill of the average North American birder has actually declined. Seriously. There are more reference works available than ever, but birders are misidentifying birds more than ever.”
That set me thinking. I don’t live in NA and wouldn’t dare comment one way or the other on the field skills of American birders, but if Kenn Kaufman, a guy who has spent a lifetime learning how to properly identify birds and is deservedly ranked amongst the elite of American birders, says that skill levels have declined then it is going to be true. If so though, why?
There are, as Kenn says, an abundance of reference works now. There are far more birding magazines on sale than there were when I started birding, there are literally thousands of blogs and websites offering ID advice and there are hundreds of bird ID fora (none of which even existed in the pre-internet days of twenty years ago of course) full of questions and answers, and there are obviously vastly more birders around ready to share their knowledge.
So why are our skills declining?
Kenn offers up one theory, saying that, “Part of the reason is that birders are focusing more on picture-matching and less on really understanding what they’re seeing. At one time, a birder faced with a tough I.D. would study the bird and really look at its details. Now they look at pictures and say, it looked like X picture in X book or on X website. And since they don’t know which characteristics are significant and which aren’t, their picture-matching often leads them to misidentify their birds.”
I’m sure he’s right, but that’s only part of the answer (and before I go any further can I say right now that I’m certainly not implying here either that Kenn has got it wrong or hasn’t thought things through: he left a comment not a full post, and anyone who reads his books or his own blog knows that given appropriate space he would have gone into the subject with great insight and much more deeply).
Something I’ve thought for a long time now is that the explosion and availability of ‘reference works’ on identification has been something of a double-edged sword. The flood of information - much of it new and ground-breaking - has been a wonderful boon for birders of all skill levels, but it has also caused inevitable and unfortunate by-products in birders: peer-pressure to make a correct identification quickly and unequivocally, and the sinking feeling that faced with a tricky identification problem everyone but you knows the answer and that everyone else will think you ignorant if you admit you just don’t know.
Let me explain what I mean.
There are field-guides now for almost every family of birds for example. Richard Crossley himself co-authored a superb guide on shorebirds (pertinently called ‘The Shorebird Guide‘) which pioneered a new way to identify a notoriously difficult group of birds by looking at the way each species behaves, moves, holds themselves, what they look like from a distance as well as close-up. It was - to use a word I don’t especially like - a ‘holistic’ view that put shorebirds into context, and the book gave a lot of hope to a whole swathe of birders who’d virtually given up on shorebirds and couldn’t understand how some people were able to make IDs at long-range when they couldn’t even identify them when they were on a puddle a few yards away.
Similarly two excellent guides to gulls have come out in the last decade, the ‘Gulls of the Americas‘ and Larsson et al’s ‘Gulls of Europe, Asia and North America’. Both aimed to demystify the seemingly impossible task of identifying immature gulls with beautiful illustrations and photographs and masses of condensed text. Birders everywhere rejoiced and headed out to the nearest landfill or estuary with renewed confidence…
Yet, as Kenn Kaufman, says - and as I’ve seen myself many times - many identification mistakes are being made all the time, sometimes quite publicly - as, for instance, a putative American/smithsonianus Herring Gull that turned up at a reservoir near where I live in the UK, was discussed and argued about for months and was finally identified with near certainty until a dropped feather was analysed and disproved the ID totally.
How did that happen? Think about something: less than twenty years ago most UK birders had never heard of American Herring Gull, let alone had any idea what made it different from the standard Herring Gull they occasionally saw but didn’t really bother to look at because, well, it was a Herring Gull and we all know what that looks like. About ten years ago we started learning what those differences were, but at the same time discovered that there was a ‘Herring Gull’ in East Asia called the Vega Gull that possibly looked a lot like smithsonianus but as hardly anyone had seen it (and even fewer had actually studied it) no-one really knew for certain. Still, given the internet and and a few photographs surely the identification features would be pinned down quite quickly…
Now we’re in the position where Vega Gulls are being hopefully identified in the middle of North America almost routinely. I’ve seen Vega Gulls in Japan and South Korea in four different winters and they can be hugely variable and mind-bogglingly difficult to identify. Even my brother Nial, who lives in South Korea and has been studying Vega Gulls for fifteen years (and is one of the best field-birders I’ve ever met) says that he can’t definitively assign some smithsonianus-like Vegas sometimes, and is amazed that birders with - in some cases - virtually no field-experience of Vega Gull are trying to identify extra-limital birds thousands of miles away from the known range. (As it turns out recent DNA work apparently suggests that Vega Gulls are eastern forms of American Herring Gulls anyway which would makes separating many of them impossible …)
It’s as if birding has reached the stage that because we’ve heard of it, because a few superb birders are prepared to identify it, because we can find it in a book, then we can all put a name to every bird we see. We’ve become the instant experts that Kenn alluded to in his comment.
But the vast majority of us are not experts, not even close to it. Historically anyone wanting to become an ‘expert’ in a subject took an apprenticeship, learned from the best, and studied and honed their skills for many years. Most of us just don’t do that: we have busy lives, we have other skills we need to develop, we have lives outside birding. Besides, experts are actually different to the rest of us. They have a talent that we don’t. Birders like Kenn and Richard Crossley, like Steve Howell and Jon Dunn who wrote ‘Gulls of the Americas’, are genuinely gifted observers. They have an amazing ability to focus, an innate ability to ’see’ rather than just ‘look’. They can handle the information they need to make an identification as quickly and accurately as skilled linguists can switch between languages. They make identification seem easy - perhaps too easy.
I say that because they all will have one other thing in common too. Every expert birder I’ve ever met will say that some birds simply can’t be identified. On page 13 of ‘The Shorebird Guide’ the text says, “although most aberrant birds should be indentifiable…some birds are left unidentified”. In ‘Gulls of the Americas’ the wise words “The proportion of unidentifiable birds never reaches zero” can be found on page 11. Why then do some birders insist on trying to put names to every bird - even to ones they’ve only seen one photograph of?
My feeling, and I may be wrong but then that’s the nature of discussion, is that many birders now believe that because of the wealth of reference material available to them they genuinely think that they’re supposed to be able to identify everything, that their friends and colleagues - some of whom they’ve never met and only know online - can certainly identify everything, and that if they can’t identify everything then their peers (who are just as nervous as they are in reality) will think less of them. They won’t be the good birder that they want to be in other words…
Which is ridiculous, and - again in my opinion - does us all a disservice. We’re not all Kenn Kaufman or Richard Crossley and we really shouldn’t be in the least bit ashamed to admit it. Not only are we in danger of not enjoying our birding quite as much as we continually rank ourselves as ‘just not as good as we’d like to be’, we’re heading towards a position where even many reasonably good birders are afraid to speak up and ask for help because they (we) are starting to feel that as no-one else is asking why such-and-such a bird’s identity isn’t being questioned it’s because everyone else present is absolutely certain and doesn’t need to talk about it. And God help the birder who does pluck up the courage to ask, because I’m willing to bet my Swaros that even those who agree with them won’t speak up and admit they don’t know either: there will be the usual awkward silence until the inevitably haughty voice of the ‘expert’ cuts the questioner to ribbons and everyone else looks at their shoes and silently vow never to speak up again…
I’m being hyperbolic of course, and - again of course - active discussions are taking place at birding sites right now, but I hope you get my general drift. It seems to me that there is a huge pressure to act as if we know how to identify every bird. We can’t though. It’s not possible, and we all ought to be able to admit that. Heck, I see birds every day I go birding that I can’t identify for sure and I hope that if you were to go back through the posts on this blog you’d find me happy to admit it. In a way I’m now so experienced that I know I’ll never be a Kenn Kaufman or a Nial Moores or a Richard Crossley: I’m not prepared to work hard enough, my brain doesn’t function in the way that their’s do, and my memory is shot to pieces after years of jet-lag and night flights. However, I’m good enough to be the birder I want to be, I still enjoy learning and discovering, and I enjoy being right and don’t mind being wrong. I’ve accepted that I can’t possibly absorb everything in even one of the field-guides I own let alone everything in all of them. And does it matter? Of course it doesn’t.
I love birding and I love birds, and I’m a pretty good birder, but I’m not an ‘expert’. I’m comfortable admitting it, and I’ve realised in the last year or so that I want to help other birders feel comfortable about their lack of perfection too. We should all get up right now and make a vow to be happy with our abilities (and if next time we’re out we happen to be a better birder than the person we’re standing next to then we should either offer help or keep our mouths shut, because belittling someone because they’re even less expert than we are is just not acceptable…).
Why can’t we identify birds? Because birding is actually very hard. Much, much harder than many ‘reference works’ and ‘experts’ on the net seem to suggest. Being a really good birder is even harder still. Being an expert is the preserve of a tiny minority of the most highly skilled and talented. And that shouldn’t be a problem. You know, I think us ‘ordinary’ birders need to reclaim birding, need to admit - to ourselves and to each other - that we don’t know everything, that we’re still learning and will be learning until the day we die, and that ‘knowing that we don’t know’ is absolutely fine and dandy, thankyou very much.
Maybe if we did there’d be fewer over-confident mis-identifications, and we could all - when faced with that impossibly scruffy 1st year gull - stop feeling the awful despair of being the only birder alive who just hasn’t got a clue what it is…
In my opinion anyway.
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I won’t begin to pretend I’m an expert birder, not even close. And I don’t have enough experience to know whether or not bird identification skills have gone down or not. But the whole essay certainly is interesting and rings a bell to some extent. I wish I could remember whether it was David Sibley, Pete Dunne, both and/or others that say in their books that you need to realize that many birds are best left unidentified. You just don’t get enough visual clues, or maybe aren’t paying enough attention to them, to make a iron-clad, or even aluminum-foil-clad, case for an ID.
This has always seemed true to me. But that’s also a large part of the enjoyment of it: puzzling out an ID that you truly believe in. I’d say that the majority of people I run into birding seem to have somewhat similar goals. There’s really nothing enjoyable in IDing a bird that you’re not sure of. But when I start reading birding blogs and other literature I often find much more certainty, and much more of a certainty as an expectation. ‘Of course that bird is such and such.’
Uncertainty is just ‘fine and dandy’ with me as well. It’s part of the fun.
P.S. Sad to say I could not make this comment using Firefox. I had to switch over to IE. I’m not sure why that is.
I thought Gavan’s comment after Kenn’s was rather pertinent. I know more than a few times I’ve been guilty of the “get as many pictures of whatever the hell that is so you can try and work it out later on the sofa with a cup of tea, all the books and the internet gurus on hand” school of bird identification; partly because I can, partly because I don’t trust my own identifications in a fleeting moment and so trying to do it that way seems “safer” ie more likely to result in an id.
Excellent! And thank you.
Excellent response, Charlie! I think you are correct there is some danger in overestimating one’s own ID abilities and also a bit of peer pressure to ID even very tricky birds. Not every sighting can be firmly identified, and not every sighting needs to be identified. To the extent that it is a problem, I think it crops up mainly in the listing and rarity-chasing culture. There is much more temptation to push an ID beyond what observed field marks indicate if the goal is to add to a list or gain bragging rights. If birding is primarily about enjoying watching and listening to birds, then misidentified or unidentified individuals are not really that much of a problem.
That said, I am not convinced by Kaufman’s claim about birder skill levels. For one thing, birders have always made ID mistakes. Every birder, even the experts, have to start somewhere, and that usually involves mistakes (and even matching birds to Peterson’s illustrations). The difference now is that the mistakes become more public, via RBAs, email lists, blogs, and other electronic media. While birding discourse used to be controlled by a small group of elite birders, now birders of all skill levels have the means to post and discuss their sightings in public. I think that trend is great because it spreads enthusiasm for birds and perhaps gives conservation a bit more of a constituency. I can understand that not everyone may feel that way.
My second problem with Kaufman’s claim is that it is not clear to me that he is comparing like sets of birders. The average birder is going to be someone who birds mostly on weekends and may occasionally attend a birding festival or spend a vacation in a bird-rich destination. It’s not really fair to hold this group to the standards set by the highly skilled group that Kaufman was associated with in the 1970s. The behaviors that he mentions - careful study of individual birds and understanding which field marks are significant - to me are the mark of an advanced birder with extensive and frequent field experience. An average birder isn’t necessarily going to have the time or inclination to gain that level of field experience and expertise, either now or in the old days.
Tai Haku: Hiya, I know you’re being slightly flippant, but it’s interesting that you say ‘guilty’ of the “get as many pictures of whatever the hell that is so you can try and work it out later on the sofa with a cup of tea, all the books and the internet gurus on hand”? Why guilty? We all do that surely? In days gone by birders would have shot ‘whatever the hell that is’ and worked it out in a museum or by showing it at a bird club meeting. Now we take photos. My point was that we somehow seem to think we OUGHT to be able to identify everything on the spot and we (or at least most of us) just can’t - so, I say, shed that guilt, rejoice in your methodology, and enjoy
John, I think you raise some interesting points. Nonetheless, Kenn’s comment deserves consideration. After all, who has spent more time in the field with as wide a cross-section of birders as he has over the last 30 or so years?
Actually, the situation seems analogous to that of SAT scores in the United States. Despite the much greater emphasis on preparation coupled with the plethora of useful test prep available, test scores haven’t gone up. In fact, unless I missed another recentering event, they’ve gone down on average over the last 15 or so years. One of the main reasons for this is because so many more students are college bound than there were 15 years ago. Increasing the population means that talent may become diluted, lowering the average level of ability. If this is the case among birdwatchers, I for one have no complaint. I’d rather have an army of enthusiasts than a small squad of ace birders (unless I’m in the field, in which case that should be completely reversed!)
John hit the nail on the head for me. Kenn’s comment has been irritating me all day and I’ve been trying to figure out why, but John’s point of “what exactly is an average birder” and pointing out that Kenn was part of a select group in the 1970s that helped my figure out why it bothered me.
Many birders were left to struggle on their own in the 70s without the help of even a local bird club let alone the pool we have today. And, how many times have ornithological records committees gone back to change a record of a bird because they realize that a sighting from 90 years ago probably wasn’t accurate? Lots of mistakes have been made, we just have a more public forum or those mistakes.
I love Kenn, but when I read a comment like the average North American’s birder skills are declining, it’s akin to my old uncle saying, “These darn kids today and their rap music and interwebs, they didn’t do as well as we did when I was growin’ up. Parents had it so much easier in my day.”
Charlie’s essay is an invitation to birding. It’s celebratory even if it is an enticement to defensiveness. Kenn’s comment is used here as a springboard. No one said anything about the state of birding being better in the past, no one demonized any of us who mis-identify birds and Kenn’s comment is about an observation on skill, not an argument about the # of mis-IDs.
Throw out all field guides! Spend time out in the field, thats how you really learn. Kenn is right, the skill of the average bird watcher has decreased, I’m amazed that people who are considered “good” birders can be so dependant on a book to confirm even the most basic ID’s. That isn’t to say that field guides aren’t useful, just don’t use them as a crutch.
Kenn and David Sibley combined for an article on the most misidentified birds in the April 2002 Birding that’s worth a read, especially the introductory comments and under Empids and age/sex/subspecies.
Kenn’s probably right about the decline in skill, but as Mike says, it’s got more to do with an increase in numbers than a regression. I’m sure that the skills of the birders who work at it are improving all the time. They’re probably making the same number of mistakes, but most are in the category of being overly certain rather than completely wrong.
I am a bit bothered by the people that constantly post photos and ask for help without actually attempting to get the ID themselves (especially when they post the same birds once a month), but if they’re out there enjoying the birds, I’m not sure if it’s a problem. I’ll take their reports with a grain of salt and hope they eventually will take the time to learn on their own. And given the teaching approach of the Shorebird Guide, I expect Richard’s guide to do a good job of that when they’re ready.
Taryn: Thankyou. That’s exactly what I was trying to write (despite some wretched jet-lag getting in the way!).
What a fine, thoughtful essay by Charlie Moores! Apparently I touched it off, too, with a brief comment I left on another post a few nights ago. After I sent that comment, I wondered if I should have, because a casual reader might have misinterpreted it to be critical of Richard Crossley (a friend and a superb I.D. expert) or critical of beginning birders (which would be ironic, considering how much effort I’ve spent trying to get new people into basic birding). But if I inspired Charlie to write this excellent essay, I’m glad I sent it.
I’m glad even if it did irritate my friend Sharon, and give her an excuse to use, for the zillionth time, her line about her old uncle shaking his fist at the kiddies. Sharon, I think you (and a couple of others) missed my point, probably because I didn’t express it clearly enough. I’m not objecting to new technologies — after all, I was the first to use digital editing to juxtapose multiple photographic images in a field guide format, at a time when such digital manipulation was an alien concept to most birders; and I have current projects in the works that rely on technologies that aren’t even on the market yet. I’m definitely not objecting to the flood of new birders — I’d like to think that I’m helping to contribute to it. And I’m certainly not hearkening back to some “good old days” time when the birders were all experts. None of the above.
The “elite group” of birders that I associated with in the 1970s consisted mostly of avid teenagers. Thanks to the Ohio Young Birders Club and other organizations, I still get to hang out with avid teenagers, and I can tell you that they know far more than we did at that age. In fact, the top experts today, of all ages, know a lot more than the top experts of 30 years ago, simply because there is so much more information available now. Details on molt and plumage cycles, a plethora of recent splits, Red Crossbill types, details on nocturnal flight calls, etc., etc., were mostly or entirely unavailable back then, but are readily available now. The two big volumes of Peter Pyle’s “Identification Guide” represent a treasure trove that we would have killed for in the 1970s — we simply had no access to info like that.
I think it’s clear that real experts today know more than real experts of the past. And I hope it’s true that there are more beginning birders now than ever, because we need more people who appreciate birds and who are willing to support conservation. My comments about I.D. skill were about the people in the middle, the birders who put names to all the birds they see well. Compared to 20 or 30 years ago, I think there are now more misidentifications, per capita, within that group.
Actually, I think Charlie expressed it better than I did, in referring to overconfidence. I probably should have said something about excessive confidence and false precision. In the 1980s, a birder seeing a female American Kestrel might say, “I think it’s a Merlin.” Now the statement is likely to be, “This is definitely a second-year female Merlin of the Taiga subspecies.” It sounds more impressive, but because of the confidence and the detail, it’s farther from the truth. And the more-precise-but-still-wrong identification of today is almost certainly based on direct comparison to a particular picture, rather than on analysis of what the bird looked like.
So to return to my original point: I think the increased level of misidentification is based, at least in part, on increasing dependence on simple picture-matching in place of studying specific characteristics. I’m not objecting to the picture-matching approach because it’s all new-fangled, and different from the way we did it in the old days; I’m objecting to it because it keeps birders in a state of never understanding what they’re seeing. Everyone should go birding in whatever way they choose, of course. I have written (and I still firmly believe) that “Birding is something we do for enjoyment, so if you enjoy it, you’re a good birder.” But IF you want to become skilled at I.D., you have to go beyond picture-matching. And IF Richard wants his book project to be really helpful, rather than just commercially successful, he’ll have to put at least as much effort into the text as into the pictures.
As a birder in the middle I think that I might be an exception in that I often freely admit not knowing what a bird is (far too often for my liking)! I am frequently amazed at expert birders who can make great calls on distant or brief looks at birds, and, as Kenn said, there are some amazingly good young birders out there that have skills that beggar belief.
I wonder how much the ultra-specific identifications by average birders are just total bluster by birders who are unsure of their identifications but hope that by being so precise that no one will dare challenge them (and might mistake them for one of the experts)? I bet that is at least as much to blame as using the technique of matching pictures to make identifications.
Regardless of what is causing more misidentifications (if there are more) I think everyone can agree that being out in the field watching birds in the company of good birders who freely share their knowledge is the best way to learn. So, expert birders, please help us average and beginning birders that you meet in the field so that we can become more expert (and don’t be mean when we screw up)! And, beginning and average birders, please don’t get all big for your britches and think that just because you have a big ol’ life list and know a couple of fancy words or phrases like “tertials” and “primary projection” that you can identify every bird.
Now go outside and watch birds and have fun!
I am standing up applauding at Corey’s comment and I want to thank you Charlie for the great post. I am one of the lucky ones who have kept track of the birds I have seen but have not even listed them as of this day. I don’t even know how large my life list is!
I do know that I am lucky enough to be in the presence of some very good birders whenever I go birding with my local Audubon Society because they are sharing, giving individuals who are not afraid to say they are not sure on a specific bird ID. I have yet to encounter a birder that would even think of berating another birder for opining on a bird sighting, even if they are a first year birder!
It is obvious to me that birding is the enjoyment of observing birds and their activities in their natural habitats, as well as identifying them. As a matter of fact, it is always just as exciting for me to see a common bird engaged in an activity I have never seen before as it is to see a bird I have never seen. Bird behavior is key to bird identification and that is how birding in the field expands the knowledge base of beginning and experienced birders alike.
I agree with Mike that “I’d rather have an army of enthusiasts than a small squad of ace birders” but I also enjoy teaching others what little I know about birding, as I learn from those with more knowledge than myself. So the fun is in having that army of enthusiasts AND the small squad of sharing, giving ace birders!
Maybe someday soon I will fire up my AviSys program and discover how many birds I have on my Life List, but for now, I am too busy birdwatching and blogging to take the time to do it. I know I’m having fun as are all the birders I know
Thanks one and all for the comments and the way this post has been received…it’s quite something to be thanked publicly for saying what you think and I appreciate it deeply (and am honoured that Kenn should be so generous with his praise!). I think perhaps I wrote from a UK perspective, where the birding is intolerably intense sometimes and I’ve witnessed many cringe-making moments of insensitivity on the part of ‘experts’ to newer birders. I can honestly say that most of the US birders I’ve met have been much more relaxed types…Take care and enjoy the weekend everyone
Wonderful reflections. As an anthropologist, I find it intriguing how birding and other kinds of nature study (like any form of human behavior) are shaped by culture and social relations.