A comprehensive guide to learning field identification, songs and calls prior to arrival at a new birding destination

1. The starting point: making a list of possible birds
2. Getting to grips with field identification
3. Learning vocalisations
4. Retaining information
5. Concluding remarks

DISCLAIMER: I AM MIGRATING MY WEBSITE AND DURING THE PROCESS, SOME IMAGES AND MEDIA HAVE BEEN LOST FROM MY POSTS, THE POSTS REMAIN ONLINE BUT BE AWARE THAT SOME CONTENT MAY BE MISSING. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER, I WILL TRY TO UPDATE THE POSTS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE

The way most of us learned the identification of species in our home country was probably a long, gradual process where we slowly absorbed information from books, people around us and personal experience. Songs were learnt through peering into a bush to see what was making an unfamiliar noise, tough identification conundrums were learnt through lots of trial and error and guidance from those more experienced than us. Slowly but surely, confidence was built through experience. However, birdwatching holidays don’t afford us the luxury of getting to grips with species over years. Often you get one or two weeks to find hundreds of new species, sometimes entirely new families.

We’ve all been in that situation where we thumb through our field guide on the plane with a naive sense of confidence, only to be completely overloaded with unfamiliar sounds and identification challenges. I remember a trip to Uzbekistan where I stared blankly at Iduna warblers without the faintest idea of what I was looking at, not to mention a chorus of songs and calls that fell upon deaf ears, probably including a couple lifers that I completely overlooked.

This guide aims to provide a simple, systematic work-flow for getting to grips with species and entire families that you have absolutely no prior experience with. This was the method that I used when travelling for the first time to Hong Kong, and I am very happy to say that straight off the plane I could already identify all of the common birds by ear easily. I can not emphasise enough just how important song and call recognition is, and there was a whole suite of species I would not have seen had I not heard them first. This approach lead to a thoroughly enjoyable, frustration-free 2 weeks of birding, with very few birds and sounds going down as unidentified.

The starting point: making a list of possible birds

Learning identification can be split into field (visual) identification and sound identification. These two approaches are fundamentally different as field identification is best learnt through comparison with related species (there’s no point learning the differences between a Eurasian Starling and a Woodpigeon), while sound identification is best learnt in order of abundance (there’s no point learning the difference between the calls of a Eurasian Starling and a Rose-coloured Starling if planning a trip to the UK, before you’ve learnt the song of a Blue Tit). This also makes sense given birds from completely unrelated families often make annoyingly similar noises.

However, going through field identification in a taxonomic order would also make little sense (and also sounds mind-numbingly boring). Learning phalarope identification before any passerines sounds like a joke.

Ebird has an incredibly useful feature to make both of these dilemma very straight forward:

First, click ‘Explore’ and then type the region you will be travelling to into ‘Explore Regions’. Try to make this region as specific (and small) as possible. For this example, I’ll be going on a hypothetical first-time trip across England. The following examples I use may seem obvious to a Western European, but try to imagine that you have never seen the following species, imagine that a Woodpigeon or Blackbird is as unfamiliar as, say, a ubiquitous bird in Togo.

Having typed your region of choice into the search bar, you should now be on a new webpage. On the left of your screen there should be a link that says ‘Target Species’.

This will bring you to a webpage that lists all recorded birds (on eBird) from your target region, ordered by abundance. Try to narrow down the list as much as possible by filtering by the month(s) you will be visiting in the top menu.

Annoyingly this feature doesn’t work for a location you’ve already visited (and made checklists for), although this can be worked around by filtering by year-list, assuming you haven’t visited your travel destination yet this year.

Here we see the 10 most frequently seen species in May in England. For example, the Common Wood-Pigeon is reported in 71% of complete checklists in May in England. The map button on the left of the screen allows you to see where the bird has been reported before in the specified month (May) in the specified location (England). This feature is not very useful for ubiquitous birds like Woodpigeon, but can be invaluable for planning trips around seeing birds lower down in the list of 433 species.

Getting to grips with field identification

We have established that the best way to learn field identification is through comparison with related species. So, take your first bird in the list and familiarise yourself with it. What family is it in? What other species in that family could feasibly be confused with it? What features immediately stand out to you?

In this example, I have a Woodpigeon. Click on the name of the bird and you’ll be taken to the eBird page for the species, flick through the pictures.

It is now that another invaluable website comes into play for the workflow, the Macaulay Library. Search your species name and filter by month and location. I would also recommend sorting images by ‘best quality’. As you’re well aware, plumage can be very variable temporally: perhaps a trip in March will mean learning juvenile plumages is unnecessary? Perhaps a trip in June will mean only summer plumage birds will be present. Familiarising yourself with what the species looks like at the correct time of year can save a lot of effort learning unnecessary details.

As well as temporal variation, filtering by location on the Macaulay Library also allows you to familiarise yourself with the local subspecies. This is particularly important in the tropics where subspecific variation is so large.

Now, it’s time to find confusion species. What makes this process a great deal easier is turning scientific names on (My eBird > Preferences > Species Name Display > ‘Both’) to find congeners. Using Ctrl + F (Command + F on Mac), first search for members of the same genus, then try common words that link the family, such as ‘Pigeon’ or ‘Dove’. If the family is not familiar to you, field-guides (e.g. Collins Bird Guide for Europe) or Birds of the World (a paid Cornell subscription service that I would highly recommend) can be of great value, even Wikipedia can be very helpful.

In the interest of your sanity, for larger families it is worth only doing one genus or subgroup at a time (e.g. treating dabbling ducks as one group, then looking at diving ducks when the time comes).

Searches for ‘Columba’, ‘Dove’ and ‘Pigeon’ have yielded 5 results, three of which look very common. For the less common results, have a look at the map.

It looks like European Turtle Dove would be well worth learning on a trip to the south east of England, perhaps not so much on a trip to Cumbria. That being said, if you’re only going to one county, you wouldn’t need a list of all English birds. Try to make the location as specific as possible.

The result for Rufous Turtle Dove seems dubious, inspection of the map finds that only 1 bird was present… in 2016, hardly worth preparing for. As a rule of thumb, anything above 0.5% is very possible to find over a couple weeks birding; some species have very low percentages but are abundant at a select few sites (e.g. Willow tit has a frequency of 0.4% but could quite comfortably be targetted in the north-west of England). Anything below 0.5% starts to get into the realm of vagrancy or (rare passage migrant), apart from severely range-restricted species. It is always worth checking the maps. For a very small area like Hong Kong, often well-twitched birds had very inflated abundances, a single 2023 record of Brown-eared Bulbul had an abundance of 0.5% for checklists in April, probably because everyone dropped everything to twitch the bird, making it appear that it was very common that week. Again, always check the maps.

So, now you have a list of birds that could possibly be mistaken for your focal bird. Compare images, have a look on the Macaulay library, read the region’s field guide, look at identification articles; I’d recommend looking at BirdForum identification threads for more challenging taxa. This may not take very long, as is the case of the British pigeons and doves, but for other families it may be much less straightforward (think waders, gulls, phylloscopus warblers, etc.).

I recommend writing notes where necessary. Make a Word, Google Sheets document or physical notepad and write the key identification features separating the taxa you’ve just looked at, this doesn’t have to win a pulitzer prize, just something you’ll be able to refer to quickly and easily. Perhaps a bullet point each for e.g. Woodpigeon, Stock Dove, Collared Dove, Rock Dove and European Turtle Dove. How can you separate them? Where are they likely to be found? Include images if necessary. For some taxa (such as doves), you may not find this step necessary, it is indeed quite hard to mistake a Collared Dove for anything else in the UK. Downloading a well-kept and well-written document to your phone can be a fantastic (and light) alternative to a hefty field-guide.

Repeating the process detailed above should be slow at the beginning but rapidly pick up pace. For the first ten species seen above, you would already become familiar with pigeons, thrushes, corvids, chats, the wren, tits, dabbling ducks and finches, a very solid base. Magpie (6) and Jackdaw (8) would probably already have been covered by the Carrion Crow; you can see that as you go through the list, you’ll come across more and more species you’ve already looked at. By the time I got to 150 on my Hong Kong list, there would be strings of 10, 15 birds I’d already be familiar with and wouldn’t have to check again.

This approach is fundamentally no different to working your way methodically in a taxonomic order from waterfowl through to buntings. However, this method is far better for one main reason. If, for whatever reason you run out of time, you can rest assured that the families you didn’t have time to study are less abundant than those that you have studied. It would be a bit of a disaster not having time to study Rosefinches on a trip to central China, but having an encyclopaedic knowledge of the area’s diving ducks.

For more unfamiliar and difficult families, download some images of harder plumages. You’ll need these later.

Learning vocalisations

We all want to be able to find a vagrant bird through hearing a single flight call, but the majority of the time starting from the bottom (in terms of abundance) is a huge waste of time and energy.

The key benefit to knowing songs and calls is search image; you don’t have to waste your time waiting for every common bird to come out of a singing bush. Stepping off of the plane and being able to discern all of the ubiquitous species by ear before even having seen them saved so much time for me, and allowed me to focus my ears, eyes and energy on finding more uncommon birds. I was able to learn the calls and songs of the 170 most common species in Hong Kong with pretty little effort; with more time a much higher species number is very feasible. A fantastic app called Anki was used to retain all of that information (more on that in the next section), but this section will cover how to find the right vocalisations.

The key website used was Xeno Canto, a fantastic online database of bird (and other animal) vocalisations.

Here I will be using the example of Eurasian Blackbird, the second most frequently encountered British bird in May. First, type your species of choice into the search-bar on the home screen.

The first thing you should see is a map. Each dot represents a recording (or multiple at the same location). Different coloured dots represent different subspecies. Clicking one of the subspecies on the right-hand side of the screen will filter by only that population. Click the subspecies found in the area relevant to you and scroll down.

Here you will see a (hopefully) long list of recordings. Click the play button on the left hand side of each row to listen through the different recordings; try to prioritise recordings as close to where you will be going as possible. Cross-reference with a field guide or Birds of the World. I’ve noticed that Xeno Canto can have a ‘rarity bias’. If there is a very common, vocal species, recordists are more inclined to record more peculiar sounds heard by them than their stereotypical song and call, which may be deemed boring by local birders. I noticed this with the common bulbuls, starlings and corvids in Hong Kong. In order to make sure you are learning the common calls and songs and not some aberrant begging call, I recommend cross-referencing sources such as what is written in field guides, Birds of the World or other reputable sources. If what is written in another source matches what you can hear in most of the recordings, perfect. For example, in (Common) Blackbird, Birds of the World references a fluty song, and multiple calls. Try to find an example of all (or most) of the vocalisations mentioned. If the song is very variable, try to find multiple good examples of the song that sample or showcase the variation well. This process can be made easier by sorting by the ‘Type’ column and looking for alarms, songs, calls etc.

Under the ‘Remarks’ column heading, the buttons [also] and [sono] can be very useful. If you’re into sonograms, [sono] will show the sonogram for the recording in question. See The Sound Approach for a fantastic showcase of how useful sonograms can be for learning bird vocalisations. The [also] button gives a list of species the recorder could also hear in the background (note some recorders don’t add to this field, so if you hear something else in the background that isn’t listed, you aren’t necessarily wrong). There was nothing more rewarding during the whole learning process than recognising and identifying vocalisations in the background of recordings as I went.

It is also worth mentioning that some vocalisations only occur at certain times of year. There is no need to learn wader songs at a tropical wintering ground, but calls will be relevant. As a rule of thumb, if a species is a non-breeder at the location that you will be visiting, check to see if there are any recordings of the song or other temporally-variable vocalisations at any of its wintering grounds. Some species, like Yellow-browed Warbler do sing on wintering grounds, others do not. Don’t waste your time learning vocalisations you won’t hear.

Once you’re happy with the songs and calls you want to learn for the species in question, click the little download icon under the ‘Actions / Quality’ heading. We’ll need them for the next step.

Retaining information

A typical approach would be reading a field guide, listening to recordings and perhaps taking notes. However, as any medicine student would tell you, no brain in the world can feasibly soak up that much information through passive methods such as reading or listening. A key component of committing songs or field-marks or any pieces of information to memory is active recall and spaced repetition. This may seem daunting to many, but flashcard apps such as Anki automate this process and make it very easy to retain copious amounts of information for pretty little effort.

First download Anki, then open up the app. Creating an account means that you can access the flashcards on any device, although this isn’t a necessary step.

You will be confronted with a screen like the one seen above, but without the list of decks. This also happens to be my flashcard app for university.

Click the ‘Create Deck’ button at the bottom of the screen and name it something like ‘Birds of x country‘. Then click ‘Add’ at the top.

Click on the ‘Front’ field and then click the ‘attachment’ icon (a paperclip) and select either an audio file or an image. On the ‘Back’ field, type the name of the relevant species and any information that you think might help future-you if you get the identification wrong.

Here’s an example of one I made for Hong Kong:

Feel free to make these as personal as you like, no one else will be seeing them. Write what features you tend to forget. Here’s an example of a more personalised flashcard:

For the harder species, make more than one flashcard for each plumage. For easier species, don’t bother making a flashcard at all. You won’t need a Golden Oriole or Hoopoe flashcard for Spain.

The ‘tags’ field at the bottom can be useful. Perhaps the region you are visiting has lots of species that make rattling calls. A ‘rattle’ tag can be applied and later down the road you can study just the flashcards with a given tag. This is also applicable to problem families, perhaps a ‘female flycatcher’ tag is necessary for where you’re going.

For vocalisations, I’d start with the 10 most common birds, and work in blocks of 10 or 20 until you get to a point you’re happy with, typically everything above 1% abundance, but if you have the time, 0.5% would be ideal. If you have particular target birds which are way down the list, feel free to prioritise learning their calls, although I wouldn’t do so until you’ve at least learnt the most common 100ish species. I wouldn’t bother learning vagrant or rare passage migrant calls until you have leant all of the reliable species first.

Once you’ve finished making flashcards, navigate to the Anki ‘Decks’ page, click on the deck and start studying. The Anki algorithm makes a card that you have previously found easy less likely to come up. You can split up your picture and sound decks into two if you like (as I have done), or lump them all in one big deck, whatever suits you.

To personalise the settings of your deck, go to Decks > Click the cog next to your deck > Options. I recommend setting the order to random, ticking the box to bury related cards and also having the new cards per day set to around 20, unless you are cramming a week before a trip, in which case make it as high as you want. Having only 20 new flashcards a day means that you’ll never spend more than 20-30 minutes on Anki per day, preventing you from burning out. It’s also very hard to retain a ridiculous amount of new songs / calls / plumage details every day, your brain won’t be able to keep up.

If you only have, say, a week to learn all the birds of Costa Rica or some other extremely biodiverse country, fear not. Your brain can be overloaded with huge amounts of flashcards at the price of your sanity. I once did close to 800 new flashcards in 3 days for my university exams (although I did make the flashcards further in advance; making and completing 800 flashcards in 3 days would be impossible). It worked out, and I did well, but to say I was shattered afterwards would be an understatement. Please do try to start this process as far in advance of your trip as possible.

Concluding remarks

So that’s it! Aside from the key workflow of eBird > Macaulay library > Birds of the World >Xeno Canto > Anki, lots of online identification articles and bird forum posts were also used in my quest to learn the birds of Hong Kong. My method can be used for any destination, but be mindful of the resources available to you for each destination. On a trip to Europe, Collins bird guide and Nils Van Duivendijk’s Advanced bird ID handbook would be invaluable resources for familiarisation with species, trips to other places would have different books available, albeit of variable quality.

I hope this guide can help you achieve a frustration free visit to your next birding destination!

Cover image by Stephan Sprinz