The RSPB has a really great website. (That’s the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.) This link is to the page where you can look up birds by name.
The pictures might only let you recognise a bird if you are very lucky but the sounds are great. I would like to reproduce some here but you can listen to any you want on the RSPB site.
The first one you play will startle you, making you suspect there’s a bird trapped in your room. It’s a mildly amusing trick to play on anyone else who doesn’t know what you are doing…..
If you live in the UK, you can volunteer to take part in the British Trust for Ornithology survey, a piece of research based on people’s reports of what birds they can see on a given day.
Well, Heather, I liked you already but now that I know you’re a fellow twitcher (we call them birders in the U.S.), I like you even better.
Here in the U.S., we have three national bird counts. On a designated Saturday in the spring and on another one in the fall, we do a migratory bird count. Each year around Christmas, the Audubon Society sponsors its Christmas bird count, which just takes a national “snapshot” of a typical wintry day. The neatest thing about these bird counting exercises is that non-scientists can actually contribute to scientific research. Although the skills of the counting teams vary greatly, there’s so much statistical data by the end of the day that it has some real validity.
There are also hundreds of local bird counts going on throughout the country all the time. My favorite is a weird one, because it’s mostly done by ear. Early one morning during breeding season, right before the “dawn chorus” starts, we meet in a state forest and are assigned seven “stops” per two-person team. At each stop, you count off fifty paces into the woods and listen. One of the team members has a diagram, which looks like a target divided into quadrants, and the other holds a stopwatch. You try to locate and identify the bird sounds you hear during the first five minutes, and enter the names of the species in red in the appropriate places on the chart. Then you continue for another five minutes, entering the species in blue. (This allows the data analyst to decide whether an individual bird has merely moved a short distance or if its another bird you’re hearing.) Sometimes you actually get to see a few birds, but the point of the exercise is to find the ones that are sheltered out of sight.
The mosquitoes usually join in the fun, so my teammate and I slather ourselves with repellent. This action is similar to prayer: it creates false hope but has no measurable results.