23.05.2024 - Indoor Meeting : A Bird ID Workshop

​Speaker: Jenny Donelan, BTO.
Reporter: Cath Robinson
Jenny is a BTO Training Officer who as part of her job creates and delivers educational materials and training activities to help with Bird identification and BTO surveys. She had an infectious enthusiasm about her role in communication and only at the end of her presentation told us she had never done it in this form before!

Her talk was in two halves: the first with visual ID and the second with sound. Both were linked by the idea of taking a structured approach to ID, taking appropriate field notes or sketches to help.
The BTO follows a “Describe, Visualise and then Memorise” pattern and tries to give you tips to enable you to do this with any bird you come across. Using a framework to describe a bird in a structured way enables others to understand what you saw, and it becomes easier to identify.
So as anyone who has done a BTO online ID course knows, first is structure, structure, structure. This will never change with season unlike plumage or colours, so is dependable. Long neck, short neck; wings project beyond tail or not; type of bill and proportion to headsize; shape of bill; leg size in proportion to body..... simple but helpful hints.
Then on to plumage and description by body part so using a simple anatomy of a bird: crown, chin, nape, moustache, eye stripe, supercilium, mantle, shoulder, back, rump, flanks, wing bar/s, legs.....Voila. The first session finished with audience participation trying to use these techniques to describe some common birds from a picture and getting others to work out what they were. Not so easy as you’d think!
The second part was giving hints to describe a song or bird call: Think of length of song, (Chiffchaff cf Willow Warbler), pitch (high or low; rising or falling), tone, quality (rich or scratchy), volume and repetition: and is this a phrase (Ike a Song Thrush), a warble or a trill? Jenny showed us sonograms to help us see how the sounds could be represented visually. It
was clear to see here how the Chiffchaff call was different to the Willow Warbler call with the latter 2 syllables and a sonogram looking more like a tick than a line. We were tested with sonograms for Great Reed Warbler, Marsh Warbler and Blyth’s Reed Warbler: interesting task to match the song to bird to sonogram.
And then some hints to try to memorise the song or call. Many birds have a well-known phrase attached to their songs: “teacher” for Great Tit, “a little bit of bread and no cheese” for Yellowhammer but she recommended using whatever works for you to fix the song in your memory.
Useful places for sonograms are the Merlin app and xeno-canto.org.
Many thanks to Jenny for such a stimulating presentation which gave us all something to think about.