A guide to ID essentials
A guide to our new series of ID cards
A guide to our new series of ID cards, which will help you identify even more British birds!
This month we have the second part of our series of cut-out-andkeep at-a-glance ID cards (which again you will find on the inside of the front cover of the magazine). This time around we feature larger dabbling drakes, smaller diving ducks, widespread tit species, trunk-climbing birds, owls, pigeons, herons and other long-legged wading birds. Over the next four pages, we will look at a few tips to help you master the identification of these groups of British birds.
The ID cards cover 10 of our commoner species of duck, particularly drakes (male ducks): five are the larger dabbling ducks and five are smaller diving duck species. Here are some key points to consider.
Head shape and colour
The headshape in particular is as good a place to start as any, instantly narrowing down the possibilities. For instance, of the dabbling ducks, only drake Mallards and
Shovelers have blackish, glossy-green heads. And head colour will immediately tell a drake Scaup ( blackish) from a drake Pochard (red).
While at the head end, don’t forget to check out the bill shape and colour.
Back colour etc in diving ducks
In diving ducks, the colour of the back can be critical. For instance, Tufted Ducks have black backs, whereas the somewhat similar Scaup has a pale grey back. Similarly, in all male ducks, the colour of the breast is a very useful ID hint. Shovelers and Pintails, for instance, stand out as having white breasts; as do Goldeneye and Long-tailed Ducks among the diving ducks
Speculum colour in dabblers
Look for the square area of colour on the trailing edge of the wing of dabbling ducks. This ‘speculum’ can be critical in identification of birds in flight.
Card 6 is all about woodland birds, with one side dedicated to trunk-climbing species (the woodpeckers, Nuthatch and Treecreeper); and the other side the widespread species of tit (ie., all our true tit species, excluding the localised and very distinctive Crested Tit).
Size
Particularly with woodpeckers, size is a vital starting point. Our three resident woodpecker species are in three distinct size categories. In woodland conditions, looking into bright skies, a woodpecker-shaped silhouette is often all you get to see, as a bird flies off. So, a realisation that Green Woodpeckers are much larger than Great Spotted Woodpeckers, which in turn look huge compared with the scarce Lesser Spotted Woodpecker (or Nuthatch and Treecreeper) can be vital as a first (and perhaps final) step to confident identification of these birds.
With our tit species, the thing to remember is that the Great Tit is almost sparrow-sized, the rest are much smaller, and the tiny Coal Tit is not much bigger than a Goldcrest!
Head and face pattern
Luckily, all the ‘trunk-climbing’ birds featured here have quite distinctive patterns, which can instantly identify them. Most of the tits, however, have black crowns, white cheeks and black bibs (the Blue Tit is the exception). Concentrate instead on the extent of the bib, and features like the white stripe on the back of the head of the Coal Tit.
Tell-tale signs
Just as the blue cap and white supercilium combination is unique to the Blue Tit, so the crimson on the lower belly and undertail coverts of the Great Spotted Woodpecker is a dead giveaway; no other similar birds you are likely to encounter will have this feature.
Colour
Of the five tit species we are dealing with, the Blue and Great Tits are bright yellow beneath and have blue wings and tail and a green back. The extremely similar (to each other) Marsh and Willow Tit are fundamentally brown birds. And the Coal Tit is a grey-and-buff bird, on its own. Similarly, basic colour is a good next stage in ID (after size) with the woodpeckers and other climbing species. For example, only the Green Woodpecker is green, only the Nuthatch blue-grey and buff.
Feeding area
It can be useful to know where in the woodland (or indeed out of the woodland) these birds feed. Green Woodpeckers do nearly all their feeding on ground (hoovering up ants), while Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers favour the tiny uppermost branches. Nuthatches can be found all over trees, and will walk headfirst down them, unlike Treecreepers, which like to spiral up trunks.