Birding Skills

Ambiguity and bird identification

September 15, 2007 / David Sibley / 2 Comments

Last week I had the pleasure of spending four days birding at Barrow, Alaska, working on an eider identification project with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. While there I was able to study hundreds of Greater White-fronted Geese that were grazing on the tundra – surprisingly numerous and surprisingly approachable. I’ll write a separate […]

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Judging size of birds

August 29, 2007 / David Sibley / 5 Comments

Size judgment is one of the constant quandaries of bird identification – critically important but fraught with error. In a recent online discussion about these photos of sandpipers in flight, I was intrigued by the question of how I, and others, “just knew” that these birds were too small to be Knot or Pectoral and

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