Oct 08 2026
A small, fluffy bird sits on a low branch, looking a little different from the familiar birds visiting your backyard. Its feathers seem unusually soft, its tail is short, and its coloring does not quite match anything in your field guide. You may be looking at a juvenile bird. Young birds can be surprisingly difficult …
Oct 08 2026
A small brown bird lands beneath your backyard feeder, hops through the grass, and disappears into a nearby shrub. Was it a sparrow or a finch? For beginning birdwatchers, these two groups can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish, especially when the birds have similar coloring and appear in the same habitats. Sparrows and finches are …
Oct 08 2026
A large black bird flies overhead, calls from a treetop, or lands in a nearby field. Is it a crow or a raven? At first glance, the two birds can look remarkably similar. Both have glossy black feathers, dark bills, strong wings, and a reputation for extraordinary intelligence. Fortunately, American Crows and Common Ravens have …
Oct 07 2026
Sometimes a bird gives you only a few seconds to identify it. Instead of sitting conveniently on a branch, it flashes across the yard, circles high overhead, crosses a lake, or disappears behind the trees before you ever get a good look at its colors. Fortunately, birds can reveal a surprising amount about their identity …
Oct 06 2026
You can often identify a bird without ever seeing it. A whistle from the treetops, a repeated trill from a hedge, a rich melody from the lawn, or a strange call from deep in the woods can reveal which birds are nearby long before you find them with binoculars. Learning to identify birds by song …
Oct 05 2026
Sometimes all you can see of a bird is its outline. A bird may be perched against a bright morning sky, flying too high overhead for its colors to show, sitting in deep shade, or disappearing into the evening light. Under those conditions, a field guide full of colorful plumage illustrations may not seem very …
Oct 04 2026
A bird’s beak can tell you an extraordinary amount about the bird in front of you. A short, heavy beak may suggest a seed-eater. A sharply hooked beak immediately brings birds of prey to mind. Long probing bills are common among shorebirds, while hummingbirds have slender bills that allow them to feed from flowers. Woodpeckers …
Oct 03 2026
A bird’s tail can be one of its most useful identification features. Some birds have short, square-ended tails. Others have long, flowing tails, deep forks, rounded tips, wedges, notches, or pointed central feathers. A bird may constantly flick its tail, fan it while turning, hold it upright, pump it downward, or barely seem to move …
Oct 02 2026
Sometimes the easiest way to identify a bird is to stop looking at its colors and watch what it is doing. A small bird may be hopping beneath leaves, hanging upside down from a branch, darting into the air after insects, hammering at tree bark, probing mud, diving beneath the water, or hovering beside a …
Oct 01 2026
A bird feeder is one of the easiest places to learn bird identification. Instead of catching a two-second glimpse of a bird disappearing into the trees, you may have several minutes to study it from a window. Birds return to the same perch, feed alongside familiar species, reveal their bills at close range, and often …
