Keep Calm and Bird On: October 2022
“If you don’t look, you don’t see. You have to go and look.”
-Edith Andrews
Confusing Fall Warbler season is finally here. While it is nice to have more of the little “feathered jewels” coming through, it can also be very frustrating as sometimes those ‘jewels’ are pretty rough, and hard to ID. Birds of the year are often still in cryptic, drab, female-type immature plumage.
Nothing, in my old-fashioned opinion, replaces Peterson’s “Confusing Fall Warbler” page, where all the most common and easily confused are grouped together, with their differences noted. But if you use the Merlin app and are able to pick a likely species, you can see it in a variety of plumages. The catch is that the bird might fly off before you get through the key. If you can get a photo, great, but that usually requires a camera with an impossibly long lens, and that the bird holds still long enough to be photographed. Neither is easy, or quite as much fun as just sitting quietly and holding out for a good look at the bird. And studying the salient points for a refresher before going into the field doesn’t hurt either.
One last caution, or plea: practice ethical birding. Birds migrate with a thin margin between exhaustion and death. They only stop to rest and refuel with insects, fruits, and berries to carry them through the next jump, which might be hundreds of kilometers long. So don’t waste their energy by playing distress call tapes. It’s the equivalent, in human terms, of getting mugged in the middle of running a marathon. And if you are birding on private property, don’t bring 20 friends along unless it’s your property. That kind of privacy violation gives all birders a bad name.
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