Well, you’ve completed the first step and now you have a field guide in front of you. Now what? Do you read it? Just take it with you? If you want to learn to identify birds, you’ll need to learn how to use your field guide. What exactly does that mean?
When I was 14 and I had just bought my first field guide, I was looking forward to identifying each bird I saw. Unfortunately, I had fallen into the trap of a nice looking field guide with great pictures, but a field guide ill-equipped to be of much use in quickly making those identifications. It was based on bird shape and color. To a brand new birder, that might make sense, but it quickly becomes a quagmire.
From that personal experience, I can now give you some helpful advice so that the field guide will become your well used friend. One caveat here, my advice needs to be somewhat general in nature, since every field guide is set up slightly different, but my tips will suffice for almost any field guide out there.
Step 1. What is in your Field Guide?
The first thing you’ll want to do is just take a tour of your field guide and see what features it has.
Is there a checklist / life-list in it? Are pages tabbed or color coded for quick reference? How is each page set up? For example, is it one bird per page with illustrations at the top, range maps in the middle and description at the bottom? Your eyes need to get familiar with how the page is set so you can be quicker with the bird identifications.
Each field guide arranges illustrations and text differently
Step 2: How is Your Field Guide Arranged?
It’s test time. If you want to identify birds quickly in the field, you’ll need to find them in your field guide quickly, too. It’s a race when you see a new bird. Can you get some field marks identified, look it up, and confirm the identity before the bird flies away? I’ve had plenty of birds over the years fly away before being able to get to the page I needed to in my field guide.
Just like the books on this shelf could be arranged in genres, birds are arranged in field guides based on similar characteristics in bird families
So, how do you get to identify birds quickly with a field guide. Basically, it comes down to sitting with your field guide and begin looking for birds in it. This may end up being a 3 stage process depending on how well you know the different types of birds in the first place.
A. If you are a complete beginner you will first need to learn how birds are arrange in your field guide. Most are ordered taxonomically, meaning they are arranged by genetic families of birds. At this point you may want to just browse through and see what types of birds there are: ducks and geese, hawks, sandpipers, herons, gulls and terns, sparrows, finches, warblers, and so on.
B. Once you have sufficiently learned the types of birds there are, you’ll want to become familiar with where each type of bird is located within the field guide. To practice this, think of a type of bird, then as quickly as you can find that section in your field guide. Continue to do this when you have time until you can find that section within about 7 seconds. Why is this important? If you can get your field guide out and get to the section that your bird is in within 7 seconds or so, you have a decent chance of identifying that bird while it’s still around you.
C. The last stage in getting familiar with your field guide is to get down to finding a specific bird in your field guide. This is almost like step B above, but now we are looking for a specific page with a specific bird in mind. Even if you’re just a beginner, you can still do this. Think of some of the local birds in your area that you are familiar with and find them in your field guide.
If and when you update your field guide (e.g. going from an eastern guide to a full North American guide) or change guides completely (e.g. Peterson’s to Sibley’s) you will need to do these steps over again since the locations may change, organization may differ or the placement in a larger guide will change relative positioning the field guides.