Pete Dunne on Bird Watching : A Beginner's Guide to Finding, Identifying and Enjoying Birds (9780811762946) by Dunne Pete

Author:Dunne, Pete
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811762946
Publisher: Stackpole Books

Sparrow, you think? Think again. If you’ve invested time studying female Red-winged Blackbirds when they were in the company of their unmistakable adult male counterparts, you won’t be confused now.

5. Experience has a price; everyone antes up. Birding is an activity that should be, above all else, fun. No person should ever go into the field worried about making a mistake or misidentifying a bird.

A bird misidentified doesn’t lead to currencies collapsing or civilizations falling. Children won’t starve, airline schedules won’t be disrupted, the earth will continue to orbit the sun.

There isn’t a birder on the planet who hasn’t misidentified a bird. The main difference between a beginning birder and an experienced one is that thus far beginning birders have misidentified very few birds. Experienced birders have misidentified thousands.

Making mistakes, and learning from them, is the essence of experience. A misidentification just resets the board for your next encounter with a species. The obvious question is: “So how do I know when I’ve made a mistake?” For that insight, you rely on your friends—the subject of the next chapter. The text and range maps in your field guide also help support or undermine an initial identification. As well, an identification that is particularly challenging or frustrating should be a warning sign that you may be on the wrong track—searching for your bird in the wrong family, struggling to jam a square peg into a round hole.

Important tip: After you encounter a new species it is very helpful to read everything you can about it soon after. That’s why you bought all those books. Not only will this follow-up exercise support or refute your initial identification, it will help you commit to memory key facts about the bird now that it has become a bird you have encountered. It’s now more significant and real than all the undifferentiated species you have yet to bind with the spell of their names.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.