Start With the Bill, Not the Colour
By IdentifyThese Editorial · Reviewed · 3 min read
Ask someone what bird they saw and they will tell you the colour. It is the first thing anyone notices and the last thing worth trusting.
Why colour fails
It changes with the season. An American goldfinch is brilliant lemon-yellow in July and drab olive-buff in January. Every autumn brings the same question — where did my goldfinches go — and the answer is that they are still on the feeder, unrecognised.
It changes with age and sex. A female cardinal is buff-brown. A first-year male orchard oriole is yellow-green with a black bib and looks like neither parent. A juvenile bald eagle is blotchy brown and white for four years.
It changes with the light. A blue jay's blue is structural, not pigment — the feather contains no blue at all, and grinding one to powder produces brown dust. What you see depends on the angle. A grackle is bronze from one side and purple from the other.
It changes with what the bird ate. House finch red runs from scarlet through orange to yellow depending on the carotenoids available while the bird was moulting. All the same species.
And a great many species share a palette. Yellow alone covers goldfinches, warblers, orioles, meadowlarks, tanagers and kinglets.
What to use instead
Bill shape. It follows diet, and diet does not change with the weather. This is the single most eliminating question in bird identification and almost nobody asks it first.
| Bill | Diet | Birds |
|---|---|---|
| Short, thick, conical | Seeds | Finches, sparrows, cardinals, grosbeaks |
| Thin and pointed | Insects | Warblers, wrens, bluebirds, phoebes |
| Straight and chisel-like | Wood-boring insects | Woodpeckers |
| Hooked at the tip | Meat | Hawks, eagles, falcons, vultures |
| Long and probing | Things in mud and water | Herons, sandpipers, ibises |
| Flat and broad | Filtered from water | Ducks, geese, swans |
| Needle-fine and long | Nectar | Hummingbirds |
A brown bird with a thick conical bill is a sparrow or a finch. The same brown bird with a fine pointed bill is a wren, a thrush or a flycatcher. That one look has cut the list by more than half before you have thought about colour at all.
Then size, judged against something
Nobody looks at a bird and thinks "seventeen centimetres". Judge it against birds you already know, which is how every experienced birder actually does it:
- Smaller than a sparrow — chickadee, kinglet, hummingbird
- Sparrow-sized — finch, wren, bluebird, warbler
- Robin to jay — cardinal, dove, most woodpeckers, starling
- Crow to duck
- Goose, heron or large hawk
If it sat between two of those, do not force it. A wrong answer costs more than a missing one.
Then behaviour
This separates species that look alike at rest, and it is often the only thing you actually saw.
- Walks down a tree trunk head-first — a nuthatch. Nothing else does it. Woodpeckers and creepers only go up.
- Teeters its rear end constantly on a shoreline — a spotted sandpiper.
- Runs, stops, cocks its head on a lawn — a robin, and the head-cock is looking, not listening.
- Hovers at flowers — a hummingbird, or a moth.
- Soars without flapping, wings in a V, rocking — a turkey vulture.
- Takes one seed and flies off with it — a chickadee or a titmouse. They do not sit and feed.
Then, finally, colour
Not to identify — to confirm. By the time you have size, bill and behaviour, you usually have two or three candidates, and colour separates them.
That is why the identification key asks for it last and never removes a bird from the results because of it. A bird that matches everything else but not the colour you remember is still shown, below the exact matches, because the colour is the part most likely to be wrong.
The order, then
- Bill shape
- Size, against a bird you know
- Where you were
- What it was doing
- Colour
Work in that order and the small brown bird at the feeder stops being unanswerable — which one it is usually comes down to whether the breast is streaked and whether there is a spot in the middle of it.