I often struggle to identify the birds in my backyard. I know the usual suspects of course - my normal backyard visitors but when someone new comes along .... So today when these large robin sized bird that clearly were not robins and not cedar waxwings and not kingbirds arrived in my berry tree for lunch at lunch time I started another round of frustrating attempts at identifying these odd characters. This time I turned to technology for help:
A website that I find quite helpful is www.whatbird.com but specifically I like the step by step identifier on the site, which allows you to narrow down the possible bird type by using your location, it's size, colour, beak shape etc. This allows use to use as many clues as you have at your disposal to identify the bird and hopefully saves you from the embarrassment of mistakenly identifying the bird as an unusual, rare, unlikely bird that never frequents your area as the bird in your backyard -trust me I have done this. So anyways today I used this tool and determined I had Pine Grosbeaks (immature male or female grosbeaks to match the colour of birds) in my tree.
Now I really don't know if these were truly Pine Grosbeaks and based on the range map it would be kind of unusual to have them in my area. However it was the best thing I could come up with after an hour of research. As I never got organized enough to capture these birds on film, I can not get a second opinion on my identification but isn't that half the fun of bird watching - just trying to figure out who is coming to dinner?
A website that I find quite helpful is www.whatbird.com but specifically I like the step by step identifier on the site, which allows you to narrow down the possible bird type by using your location, it's size, colour, beak shape etc. This allows use to use as many clues as you have at your disposal to identify the bird and hopefully saves you from the embarrassment of mistakenly identifying the bird as an unusual, rare, unlikely bird that never frequents your area as the bird in your backyard -trust me I have done this. So anyways today I used this tool and determined I had Pine Grosbeaks (immature male or female grosbeaks to match the colour of birds) in my tree.
Now I really don't know if these were truly Pine Grosbeaks and based on the range map it would be kind of unusual to have them in my area. However it was the best thing I could come up with after an hour of research. As I never got organized enough to capture these birds on film, I can not get a second opinion on my identification but isn't that half the fun of bird watching - just trying to figure out who is coming to dinner?
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