The people at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology want to make you a better birder. They want to get you beyond recognizing little more than the robins and cardinals swaggering across your lawn. They want you outside looking for the small, furtive, flashed-across-the-yard-and-now-they’re-hiding-in-the-bushes birds, confident that you can get better at identifying what the heck they are.
Towards that end, they’ve thoroughly revamped their All About Birds website. The old version was already a pretty decent place to go for information about North American birds, but the new version is stunning. The bird guide is still there, but it’s been expanded with photos that let you see different variations of each species’ plumage as well as photos of similar-looking species to help you sort out those LBJs. And there are links to songs and video from the Macaulay Library, as well as maps that display data from the Lab’s citizen science efforts, articles from the past couple of years of Living Bird, and a skill-building section that uses text and video to walk you through basic strategies for identifying birds. Four 10-minute video episodes are up so far, demonstrating how to use shape and size, color pattern, behavior, and habitat to narrow down what you’re seeing.
So, was that a cedar waxwing hiding in my lilac bush or not? Time to find out.
Cedar waxwing photo from the Missouri Conservationist.
Birding... one of the things I'd love to get into if I didn't already have 20 other hobbies and interests.
Being in south Florida we do have an interesting variety of birds in our yard, especially larger species like herons, cranes, egrets, storks and ibis.
Posted by: Thom H. | July 10, 2009 at 01:31 PM