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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fozzybear" data-source="post: 1753947" data-attributes="member: 69297">That 'is' rather arrogant really, it's not about just looking in a book, it's much more about developing a sense of how you identify a bird. When most people start out they (I at least) find most birds to be indistinguishable from one another even with a good field guide and it really can be very difficult to pick out differences between even fairly obvious birds and trying to work out things like is that a Mistle or a Song Thrush can be extremely taxing (I got the two thrushes mixed up all the time). Over time your brain gets a lot better at processing this kind of information and some people are much better at it than others. I have this vision of a old boy in tweed "just look it up in the book, man! Didn't have this problem when we were out in '04 shooting fuzzy-wuzzies, what!"</blockquote>