Philip Sugg | Blog

I started looking at the birds more during the pandemic. So did a lot of other people. Most field guides about birds are written for one purpose: to identify them. Birding is easy to distill to its basics: you look at a bird, you figure out the name that somebody else gave it, and you keep lists of what you’ve seen.

But it would be deflationary to leave it there, that birding is about mere bird identification. It doesn’t account for why there are so many people who are very serious about identifying birds in particular. Sure, almost every branch of nature has people who take an interest in it.^1{#ffn1 .footnote}^ But I know of no other outdoor nature activity centered on identification that generates anywhere near the same excitement as birding.

One of the most thoughtful teachers of birding I’ve found in print is Ken Kaufman. His Field Guide to Advanced Birding is a good place to start figuring out what birding is really about.^2{#ffn2 .footnote}^ The “advanced” part of the title is somewhat misleading. The book is not really trying to define a bar for experts so much as give a more systematic account of the practices of modern birding, organized by case studies on, say, a specific feature (e.g., “Plumages, Molt and Wear”), a habitat type (e.g., “Learning to Identify Seabirds”), or a genus (“The Empidonax Flycatchers”). Kaufman writes in the introduction about his experience in the field teaching beginners to bird:

One revelation was the importance of understanding. It was clear that birders could memorize dozens of field marks and song descriptions and still misidentify birds, simply because they didn’t really understand what they were seeing and hearing. (5, original emphasis)

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