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Message: <blockquote data-quote="UtahnBirder" data-source="post: 1617175" data-attributes="member: 79467">(Not that I'm any good at ID yet, but this has seemed to help.)In any downtime that you can't go birding, try to think about birding, and keep your field guide close.I sometimes go "Oh ya, that Western Screech-Owl I heard about on BF or eBird or something", and then flick through my field guide and read about it. Then I look through all the other owls, and see which look close, and the subtle differences between them.If I would have seen a tern BEFORE looking through the terns, I would probably write down something like "Black Head", "Orange Bill", "Blue-Grayish wings". Of course, that pretty much narrows it down to all of them. If I had flipped through the tern section before, I could be more on the look out for things such as how far back the black on the head goes, for example.</blockquote>